The Hour of the Wolf
by Tierfal
Summary: The year is 1975. The Dark Lord is rising, but everyone looks the other way. Is Remus Lupin the only one who can smell the blood on the air?
1. Coiled

_Author's Note: I did my best to research, but I have this nagging worry that I'll get something horribly wrong. In the event that you spot an egregious mistake, please let me know, and I'll cry, with my face buried suffocatingly in my pillow and great sloshing tears pouring down my flushed cheeks. Then I'll see what I can do to fix it. Accuracy is extremely important to me._

* * *

**CHAPTER ONE**

**Coiled**

If you asked Remus Lupin at a later date, he would tell you that it began at a school hidden in plain sight in Great Britain, a school called Hogwarts, a school that was, to lost, lonely, hopeless children, a beacon in the darkness and an unimaginable paradise confined in a castle. But it didn't begin there, as tempting as it might have been to believe so innocent and innocuous a thing. It began in a dreary, gray room in a dreary, gray orphanage, when a boy named Jack took a toy from a boy named Tom.

Tom (never Tommy) Riddle had been very placidly bouncing a small red rubber ball against the wall opposite. For a boy of seven, he had remarkable dexterity, which was startlingly evident in the way that the ball rebounded impeccably and returned to his hand every time, over and over, with a deadening, relentless rhythm to the accompaniment of which Tom almost seemed to drowse a little. Someone who didn't know him might have thought he drowsed, at least; his eyelids had slid partway closed, and there was a tranquility in his round face; the glint of unsettling acuity had momentarily left his dark eyes. But someone who knew Tom Riddle would have known that he was thinking. Tom Riddle did a lot of thinking.

Jack Sampson was nine and mean-spirited. He was also quick. So quick, in fact, that he could dart into the room where Tom Riddle was tossing his ball against the wall and snatch the faded red sphere from the air before it returned to its master's hand. So quick that he could turn deftly on one heel and smirk at Tom Riddle with the triumph that belongs to a boy of nine who has successfully committed an act of mischief.

Tom Riddle's dark eyes had narrowed. "Give it back," he said.

"Nyah," said Jack.

The younger boy's eyes were little more than slits now. Jack Sampson should have noticed the eerie resemblance to a snake. "Give it back," Tom Riddle repeated.

"I won't," Jack taunted, dancing away gleefully. "I won't, ever. I'll keep it 'til I die, and they'll bury it with me in my coffin, and the worms'll chew through it and then I'll take it to Heaven."

"If there was one," Tom Riddle said, "you wouldn't go there."

"Nyah," Jack said again. His repertoire of insults was rather limited. In a few spare years it would have grown to include a vast variety of naughty words he'd picked up from listening closely when the gardener dropped the spade on his toe. "You're stupid, Tom," Jack said, although deep down, with a disconcerting certainty, he knew that wasn't true. "And you're small, and you're weak. The strong are always gonna' win, Tommy-Boy. You're always gonna' lose."

Tom Riddle smiled, but it was a smile decades older than the face it adorned. It looked almost reluctant to be settled there, uncomfortable. Tom's eyes remained untouched. If Jack Sampson had known what obsidian was, they would have looked to him very much like it.

"We'll see who's weak, Jack," Tom Riddle said then, quietly--very quietly. "And we'll see who wins."

Suddenly, Jack Sampson realized that he very badly wanted to leave. He wouldn't have admitted it if the spikes of an iron maiden had been rapidly approaching his vulnerable body, but he was suddenly afraid of the little boy across the room. Very afraid. He clenched his hand around the rubber ball, which no longer seemed worth the taking.

"You're stupid, Tom," he called, backing away slowly. "You're a stupid _prat_." It was the worst word he knew, and a decent parting blow, he thought. In addition, he pitched the ball at Tom. He missed, but the intent was the important part anyway. And then he fled.

The remaining boy frowned. He sat back a little, and he looked through and beyond the wall with hooded eyes. Tom Riddle was thinking.

The serpent had coiled. It would be many years before it could strike, and they would be small blows at first, small allotments of venom. Tom Riddle wouldn't be satisfied with that for long. Tom Riddle wasn't satisfied with anything for long.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Remus Lupin hated the tunnel to the Shack. It was cramped, and dark, and cold, and it smelled like wet earth and slimy worms and the slow decomposition of small animals. He knew better, but he always felt like this time it would never end, or this time it would collapse without warning on his head, and he'd be buried alive. Remus had given some thought to the prospect, and he had decided that being buried alive was slightly better than being burned alive and slightly worse than drowning.

"Much as I would love to look at your ass for the rest of my life," Sirius remarked, "you might move along, Remus, my dear boy."

"We all know you'd rather look for the rest of your life," James noted calmly. "No sense hiding it, Sirius. That's why you go through girls so fast."

"I don't _go through _them," Sirius responded. "It's more like... They fade, and I give up." He sounded as though he was struggling, and Remus got the impression that he had been agonizing over the subject. James had unwittingly stumbled upon the trigger to a mental mousetrap, and now Sirius was going to jam the cheese down all of their throats. "It's like--you know how when you first have a picture, it's really sharp and clear, but then if you hang it up in the sun, all the color gets bleached out of it, and then it's just kind of... grayish? Then it's boring, you know? And you kind of don't want it anymore, you know?"

"Nope," James answered blithely.

"Remus?" Sirius prompted, slightly desperately, as if he needed to vindicate such a long monologue.

"Sorry," Remus said.

"Peter?"

"Huh, what?"

"Never mind," Sirius muttered, somewhat darkly.

Remus emerged into the shadowed corridor of the Shrieking Shack and stifled a sigh of relief. No cave-in today. Though, he reflected morosely, there was still the return journey.

But that was a long way off. Hours.

His deep breath brought a quantity of choking dust into his lungs, and he coughed--a little feebly. He was already getting the shakes. It was close.

"Have you seen Lily?" James was demanding, affronted now. "To use your horrible metaphor, she's much more _colorful _than anything you've been working with, and she won't be _fading_ anytime soon."

Sirius snorted. "Like you know anything about my _very good_ metaph--Remus?"

"Fine," Remus sighed, twisting his hands together tightly to stop them trembling as he mounted the first of the stairs. "It's just about time, gentlemen."

"We'd better be ready, then," Peter put in. Peter had an extraordinary talent for stating the obvious. It had the combined effect of making people overlook and underestimate him. Both could be potent in the right hands. Remus doubted, however, that Peter's hands were the right ones.

He stepped into the hall at the top of the stairs. It was here that the dream took place--no, it wasn't a dream. Childish and sniveling as it sounded, it was a nightmare. And this was the grounds on which it occurred, in the dark hallway on the second floor. In the dream--the nightmare--Sirius was standing at that end, and he, Remus, was standing at this one. Only, you couldn't really call it standing, because standing implied an upright bipedal stance. Remus, however, had four paws planted flat on the floor and a snarl poised and ready on his lips. The young man was trying to do something--trying to change, trying to shift, trying to Transfigure himself into a different form, a safer manifestation. And it wasn't working.

The wolf could almost taste the blood. He could almost hear the heartbeat. He was hungry. Oh, was he hungry.

With less than a thought the muscles in his hind legs tensed and released, and he made the first bound across the ratty rug, the dust bursting like fireworks beneath his paws. Another bound. The young man's face was white, his lips working fast. He was saying the right words over and over, but he didn't change.

The wolf was very hungry, and the young man looked very appetizing.

The distance between them disappeared almost instantaneously, and Remus Lupin sank his teeth into Sirius Black's jugular vein.

"Remus?" Sirius prompted.

Right. Here he was. The Shack. The last vestiges of evening fading as the moon began to rise. Teetering on the brink of another night of Hell.

"Yes?" he responded. He stepped into one of the side rooms at random, his arms around himself, shaking harder now, cold sweat beading at his hairline. His vision was beginning to get hazy, and his hearing was improving a little. A breeze wormed its way through the open window and toyed playfully with the curtains; the rustling of them against the peeling wallpaper was loud, scratching like the fabric would gouge holes in the wall. His head ached insistently.

"Take a seat, Remus, m'boy," Sirius suggested, the flippant tone of his voice belying what sounded like deep concern.

Remus couldn't help but smile a little as he obeyed, flopping down into one of the highly-shredded armchairs. Every morning he woke up thinking that his friends would be gone with the rest of his wildest dreams. But every morning, they were still there. And on many mornings, Sirius was beating someone with a pillow to get his latest victim's attention.

"_Nox_," he murmured offhandedly. That done, he tossed his wand onto the bed and followed it with his coat and his shoes. Usually his clothes did something magical with themselves and vanished, only to reappear later when the process reversed itself, but Remus Lupin wasn't one to take too many chances. Besides. It was a nice coat. He'd saved up for it.

Sirius, James, and Peter clustered by the door, as they always did. The three of them, especially James, made a great show of being casual and leaning against the walls and the doorframe, but then, James always made a show of being casual. The hyperbolic extent of the motion made the artifice behind it all the clearer. But that was all right, Remus supposed. He would have been afraid of him, too. He was a werewolf, after all. Werewolves were dangerous.

It still hurt.

But it didn't hurt as much as what happened when he drew the drapes open and waited one minute, and then two.

It started out as a shuddering sensation, something that felt like the worst crawling flesh and goosebumps and shivering that had ever afflicted a human being. Then it was an itching, fierce and unrelenting, as the fur started to sprout, coarse and thick, from Remus Lupin's skin. The first wave of pain rode on the rippling fur as his tiny hair follicles protested, and he curled up small in his chair, praying hopelessly and automatically that he might not grow any larger so long as he did.

His prayers went unanswered.

Bone cracked and shifted and slid, and muscle swelled and shrank and twisted. Cartilage snapped and bent as keratin surged forth. The freakish figure in the armchair writhed, and even as it cringed, its teeth lengthened and curved to wicked points. A cry wrenched free of the creature's transmuting throat, a cry that began as an anguished scream and ended as an ear-splitting howl.

The three boys by the door huddled the slightest bit closer together. Three pairs of eyes opened just a little wider as the massive wolf unfolded its finished body from the chair and put one paw forward--towards them.

_Three heartbeats. They quicken as one._

The wolf's lips drew back. It snarled, yellow eyes glinting in the faint moonlight that penetrated the dingy glass of the windowpane.

_The blood pounds through the fragile bodies. Forward yet. Their fear rises about them in a pungent miasma._

_"Now would be a good time," the tallest says._

_"Very good," squeaks the shortest._

The wolf tensed to leap, and at that moment the three boys disappeared, and in their place were a rat, a deer, and a large dog.

The deer would be edible, and the rat might last a bite or two, but the dog looked more formidable. The wolf paused. Its ears twitched, lying down and then flitting upward again, as if as unsure as their owner.

Idly now, the dog stretched its forelegs and then proceeded to shake its furry head in a way that would have forcefully reminded even a mere acquaintance of Sirius Black.

There was a moment of silence, and then Remus Lupin wagged his tail.


	2. Wonderful

_Author's Note: If you wanted to, you know, tell me what you think, that'd be cool, too._

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**CHAPTER TWO**

**Wonderful**

Remus Lupin was closing at the Three Broomsticks again. Not only was the work reasonably lucrative, which made possible the continuation of his education at Hogwarts, it could be fun sometimes. Closing was the best, of course.

Remus usually closed on Fridays, because Madam Rosmerta trusted him and often had other appointments--or she just wanted to get some sleep. At eleven, nominally the end of his shift, she would hand him the keys, tell him he could take a few butterbeers home if he didn't cause trouble, and remind him to bring "that nice boy, Sirius" with him next time.

So here he was, at eleven twenty-five on a Friday night, all the crates moved, all the mirrors cleaned, everything in order. And he'd almost finished sweeping the floor.

Almost.

There was no one in the streets at this hour, and he'd already put most of the lights out, so he wouldn't be silhouetted in the windows. A bit tentatively, and then all at once, like an avalanche, the room changed. The floor glimmered, the remaining lights glowed, and the mirrors sparked like diamonds in the dim light. And the broom handle, of course, became a microphone.

"You ain't nothin' but a hound dog," Remus Lupin sang, "cryin' all the time; you ain't nothin' but a hound dog, cryin' all the time... You ain't never caught a rabbit, and you ain't no friend of mine."

The crowds were cheering, screaming his name; the band was in high spirits, pounding out the tune behind him; hundreds, thousands of eyes were on him, and he couldn't disappoint all those people--he just couldn't.

"They said you were _high_ class," he went on, belting it out now, forgetting the existence the window gleaming dully in front of him, "but that was just a lie..."

In reality, Remus Lupin had what most people would call a halfway-decent singing voice. He could carry a tune, though it tended to leak a little bit when he did, and he lacked the strength and power that frequented the voices of the truly great. But in his head, when he was closing, when he was bobbing and prancing and swinging his hips as if there was no tomorrow to speak of, he sounded like half a million new Galleons piled in neat, shining stacks. He sounded like a crisp, boundless night in a land overflowing with opportunities. He sounded like little creeks in autumn and beaming sunlight warming a little boy's back. He sounded wonderful, and he sounded amazing.

When he ran out of lyrics, he swept a deep, supremely suave bow, and a few of the more sentimental girls in the audience fainted clean away.

"Thank you," Remus said, affecting a pronounced drawl very poorly. "Thank you very much."

Then he cleared the last of the dirt and dust that customers had tracked in out of the corners, set the broom in the back room, requisitioned a single bottle of butterbeer, and went out the front door. A bit of searching yielded the appropriate key on Rosmerta's ring of them, which boasted something like twelve different specimens, and Remus jammed it into the keyhole and locked the door securely. He pulled on the handle just to make sure and, satisfied, tucked the keys back into his pocket and started briskly down the path to Hogwarts. He had to be back in Hogsmeade at six the next morning for opening, since he had the keys, after all, and that wasn't quite as far away as he might have liked...

But that was a long way off. Hours.

Almost midnight. The witching hour, it was called, and this one was lit by a cream-colored first quarter moon. This was the kind of night Remus loved, loved more than all the butterbeer and Chocolate Frogs in the world: just cold enough to make his face tingle, just bright enough to feel safe, stretching wide out before him like a dream. A chilly hint of the impending winter had seized the air, and Remus could taste it on the breeze that made dust swirl around his shoes insistently. He could also taste something else--something sinister.

Immediately it seemed a little too dark and a little too cold. Remus paused momentarily, and then he realized that pausing indecisively was the last thing he wanted to do. That little revelation sent him striding forward again, faster than before. Considerably faster.

If he had been Sirius, or James, he wouldn't have been so concerned. They could change at will, becoming something stronger on little more than a whim. He, however, was at the mercy of the moon, tied to the tides, linked to the lunar cycle. The wolf wouldn't help him now, not tonight. Tonight, he was no more than a boy, thin for sixteen, only a bit taller than average, out on the street late at night. Alone. Defenseless.

He huddled in his coat and walked faster still.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Lily was making a list. Lily loved lists. She was impeccably organized.

James watched her delicate white hand drag the quill across the page in delightful, swirling strokes. She was left-handed, which meant she had to be careful to keep the heel of her hand out of the ink as she laid it down. There was considerable evidence of recent failures to do so in the form of a variety of ink stains decorating her skin. Hair persisted in falling into her face repeatedly, and she persisted in batting it away.

"You, James," she said, and his heart did a graceful pirouette, "can have the first, second, and third floors. I'll take four and five, and Remus can have the sixth and the seventh. How does that sound?"

"Fine," James answered. _Spectacular,_ he thought dreamily. _Lovely. Wonderful._

It wouldn't be until the next evening, when they were exerting the pattern, that he would realize that he'd been saddled with the extra floor. At the moment, he was watching the firelight play in her hair, watching her chew absently on her lip, watching her verdant eyes flick over what she'd written. He could have watched her forever. Longer, even.

James Potter was enamored with Lily Evans. She could have walked all over him in cleats while carrying a fifty-pound weight, and he still would have been enamored with her. She was his angel and his enduring devil; the shimmering force of good that got him out of bed in the morning and the merciless torment that haunted him late into the night. Sirius laughed at him, but that only fueled his conviction, because it reminded him that there was something to laugh at in the first place, and that something was the fact that he utterly adored Lily Evans.

Dumbledore had decided that there could be three Gryffindor Prefects this year. James didn't know why, and he didn't care. Maybe McGonagall had seen him gazing at Lily, daydreaming his heart out, and had put a good word in for him. It didn't matter. There were three prefects--Remus, and Lily, and him. And Remus had a job and did his homework on time, which meant that there were a lot of moments like this one, where he and Lily plotted out the finer points of their tasks--or, rather, Lily plotted them out, and James sat watching her, feeling light enough to float away or burst into glitter at a touch, and nodded and smiled.

It was edging towards midnight by the time Remus tripped his way into the common room with flushed cheeks and a hunted expression. The wind had wrought Hell on his hair, but, somehow, it made him look very, very alive. It was almost becoming.

Lily looked up and smiled. "Hello, Remus," she said. "It'd be great if you could look at this sometime."

James smiled, too. She was so considerate. He added it to his mental list of things he worshiped about her. That list, as meticulously precise as one of hers, if written out, would have filled a meter of parchment--at least. James wasn't sure. He was a bit afraid to try.

"Sure," Remus agreed. He was breathing a little fast, though it wasn't full-fledged panting. "Could I save it for tomorrow morning?"

Lily nodded her accord.

_Agreeable,_ James added. Surely a meter and a half.

"Sirius said he wanted to talk to you," Lily reported. "Didn't he, James?"

James smiled and nodded. He was growing very adept at that. "Didn't say what about."

"Guess I'd better go see, then," Remus noted. Lily looked to her list again, and Remus made for the stairs, pausing at the bottom to indicate her subtly with his head and offer James a broad wink.

James grinned, and Remus grinned back before scampering up the stairs to meet Sirius.

Sirius Black was essentially James's brother--and might as well have been, given that he had taken up residence at the Potter household that summer. It should have been a dark, stormy night that he arrived, with rain coming down by the bucket and the pail, but, rather, it had been a lazy, slightly humid afternoon. Sirius, his face set, had asked very politely whether he might be able to stay for the remainder of the summer, knowing that James Potter would have had to have been the worst friend in the history of the world to turn him away. Never that, disgusted and mortified at the very thought, James had dragged him in off the street, unable to ignore the stony tension in Sirius's shoulders as he clapped his visitor heartily on the back. Then he had asked why, and Sirius had looked at him with eyes dark, ominous, and gray like the truant storm clouds and, in a voice heavy with a bitterness James couldn't imagine, cited "irreconcilable differences of opinion." James wouldn't have thought it possible to be scared of Sirius Black until that moment, when he found that he was.

He had stuffed Sirius full of chocolate, trusting it as the best panacea in his power, and together they'd assembled a cot in James's room. James hadn't asked Sirius whether he was going to come and stay for Christmas, too, and the next summer. The tempest in the gray eyes had told him the answer.

But he knew, as he saw Remus's trailing shoelace disappear from view up the stairs, that there were things even a brother couldn't understand. In years past, he might have been jealous of the way Sirius read Remus's thoughts, the way he protected him, the way he smiled like a proud father when Remus accomplished something great. But he knew better now. On one of many nights, while starlight streamed in the window and Peter snored softly, James had realized why Sirius had taken it upon himself to stand between Remus Lupin and danger. It was because Sirius understood now. It was because Sirius had been cast out from the only home he had, by his own blood, and now he understood what rejection of that profundity meant. He had received a glimpse of the kind of abandonment with which Remus Lupin lived every moment of every day, simply because of what he was. And a bond had been built between them, a mutual comprehension forged by a shared anguish, a connection that James Potter couldn't have broken if he had wanted to.

He didn't want to. It was what both of them needed. James didn't claim to know a lot of things, but he knew that much.

Lily laid down her quill, reviewed her list, blew on the ink, folded the parchment, and slipped it into her bag. She covered a yawn. "I think that's all I can stand for tonight," she remarked, climbing to her feet before James could gallantly offer her a hand--and he would have, too. "'Night, James."

"'Night, Lily," he replied blissfully.

She smiled that unbelievable smile of hers, shouldered her bag, and skipped up the stairs to the girls' dorm, coppery hair bouncing one last time, teasing him with a final glitter.

James Potter sighed the happiest sigh of his life.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The door to the dorm was slightly ajar when Remus reached it. There was nothing but darkness within, alleviated only faintly by the moonlight, and a shiver crawled like an enterprising spider up Remus's spine. Gently he pushed the door, and it creaked as it gave way, a gaping mouth drawing him into an endless darkness to which there was no remedy in the world...

"Sirius?" he called softly. "James said you were looking for me..."

Hesitantly, he took a step forward.

It was at that moment that a pillow hit him squarely in the face.

The lights went on abruptly, giving Remus a good view of Sirius's and Peter's grinning faces as they beat at him with pillows that sent forth forlorn eruptions of feathers in protest.

He laughed until he couldn't breathe, and likely would have continued to do so had the Fifth Years not pounded on the wall and shouted, in impressive unison, "_Shut up, ya gits_!"


	3. Hateful

_Author's Note: Date error in the summary has been corrected. I'd bet most of my life savings that you don't care._

_The Harry Potter Lexicon, whence all of my dates originate, says that Sirius convincing Snape to follow Lupin at the full moon happened in September of 1975. Prisoner of Azkaban, however, which it cites for the date, makes no mention of the month, and having it all happen so fast would be very difficult, so I'm going to ignore that particular detail. I'm sure you care very much about that, too._

_In addition, this fic is now in line to synch with everything that occurred in Deathly Hallows. There won't be anything in the way of startling spoilers, but it would only be fair to let you know. It doesn't come into play in this chapter in any case._

* * *

**CHAPTER THREE**

**Hateful**

They were bent low over the parchment, hunched like gargoyles, looking for all the world like a quartet plotting the overthrow of a dictator. Remus wasn't sure he liked that particular comparison. The idea of a conspiracy unsettled him and made his stomach twist a little.

But this wasn't a conspiracy. It was instead the fruits of the combined efforts of a few of Hogwarts's brightest, most creative, and most mischievous.

Sirius sat back first, his eyes glowing, a triumphant grin spreading slowly across his face. "It's done," he said. Remus saw Peter shiver happily. "Here," Sirius went on, graveness battling glee in his expression. He handed the quill to James first. "Sign it."

Unsurprisingly, James took his time, spelling out _Prongs_ in great, sweeping letters. Smiling faintly, Remus found that he didn't mind. If an overzealous signature was the only way James saw fit to glorify himself, that was excellent, as far as Remus was concerned. It was a marked improvement over past exertions of insufferable ego.

The tail of the _S_ dwindled to a last flourish, and Sirius took the paper next. _Padfoot_, he wrote, flicking out the lines to cross the _F_ and the _T_. He passed the quill to the boy at his right, who accepted it, his blooming reverence spreading its petals wide, and leaned over to scratch out his contribution ecstatically. _Wormtail_ squirmed its way onto the page.

It came to Remus next. Aware of the silly sentimentality, he merely admired it for a moment. It was going blank, absorbing the words that the others had written like quicksand, but he knew that beneath there lay a treasure trove of information, a feat of Charms and wit and a testament to their comaraderie that would outlast their days here. Their marks were set. The Map was forever.

_Moony_, he wrote.

And then it was complete.

They were all grinning like fools now, possessed by the helpless, all-encompassing exaltation that seeped out from their latest accomplishment like a disease.

Sirius raised his bottle of butterbeer. "To the Map," he announced.

Three fists clenched around three bottles and lifted them with as much conviction as if they had been revolutionary banners. "To the Map," James, Remus, and Peter echoed.

The glass clinked hard, and then they drank deeply.

They were still looking at the single, ostensibly unremarkable piece of parchment minutes later, too pleased for words. It was _not_ looking at it that was hard.

Madam Rosmerta zeroed in on Sirius's empty drink like a dive bomber.

"Can I get you another one of those?" she inquired sweetly, offering him the most winsome of all her smiles.

Sirius managed to focus a slightly glazed pair of eyes on her. "Hm? Oh, yes, that would be wonderful, thank you."

Rosmerta smiled again and bustled off joyously. The ridiculously conspicuous flirting that she did when Sirius was around didn't unduly surprise Remus, of course. Just about every girl within five years of his age fell in love with Sirius Black, and most of them were reduced to batting their eyelashes at him and sighing daintily. Remus had never really been very jealous of all the attention. It was probably kind of annoying.

Well, he was a little jealous sometimes. Only a little. And only sometimes.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It happened after breakfast, when just about everyone had returned to the Gryffindor common room to fetch books and bags and just generally hoard a few more minutes to themselves. Peter and Sirius had started a game of chess, which was something that they did frequently--frequently enough, at least, that Remus had come to recognize their vastly disparate styles of play. Sirius had the blunt, blind killing instinct of a genuine predator. He bulldozed his way across the board, sacrificing pieces indiscriminately to further his advances. Peter, however, was a shrewder player, a cunning strategist. Most of Peter's acquaintances would have found it hard to believe, but, then, Peter was a lot smarter than most people gave him credit for. Though he had leaned on James's and Sirius's genius with some consistency, when it came down to it, no one could do the Animagus spell for you. Peter Pettigrew had managed that, and he was brilliant in chess as well.

Peter had just repossessed Sirius's first knight, to the considerable darkening of his opponent's expression, when a Fourth Year burst in through the portrait hole, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

"Everybody!" he shouted. Subdued murmurs and raucous laughter alike died down as the fair-haired youth leapt up onto a table and repeated the entreaty even louder.

"What?" Sirius demanded, slightly petulantly.

The boy held up a Daily Prophet with ink smudged where his fingers had been gripping it. The front page was dominated by a picture of what might once have been a charming cottage. Now it was little more than rubble. Dust wafted upward lazily, and even as the dumbstruck Gryffindors stared, another fragment of wall crumbled and collapsed. Bold, urgent letters cried plaintively, _Dark Lord Flattens Half-Blood Household_, and there was another story beneath it, smaller but more terrifying: _Merciless Muggle Massacre _was the title, and the grainy picture shook slightly, as if the photographer hadn't had time to steady his hand. The subject was nonetheless clear enough: seven occupied body bags.

Silence reigned, tyranically thick and complete, for a full minute. Then Lily Evans stood, tall and straight-backed, her eyes unyielding. She would have looked completely resolved if not for the way her lip trembled.

"We should go to class," she said.

And because it was what the man behind the headlines would least have wanted, they did.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The teachers chose not to address the problem directly in class, though there was a marked uneasiness in the atmosphere. McGonagall, whose domain they inhabited first that morning, was unusually quiet, and when she released the class to practice a new spell privately, they followed suit. What smiles there were stretched thin and tight, and laughter seemed like a foreign concept.

Or it did until they were freed for lunch.

In the courtyards as they fled their classes and then shortly thereafter in the Great Hall, the Slytherins were boisterous, jovial; brighter and louder than Remus had ever seen them. They were happy. They were cheerful. They were...celebrating.

Sirius's face had contorted into a mask of unadulterated rage, of cowing fury, of deep, encompassing hatred. An artist on the brink of suicide, betrayed by his last friend in the world, sinking irreversibly into a fathomless pit of loathing for himself and all that lay around him, might have slashed the lines of Sirius's visage onto the nearest canvas, trying only to release some of the welling anger before it killed him, before he drowned in it. Sirius's knuckles were whiter than snow, clenched around his knife as if he might plunge it into the jugular vein of the Slytherin his dark eyes followed--one who smirked widely and nodded, whose eyes glinted maliciously with the best of them.

"Bunch of pale-faced, baby-killing bastards," Sirius spat.

James looked exhausted. "Let it go, Sir--"

Sirius slammed his knife down onto the tabletop, the noise like a gunshot in the silence of the other Houses' portion of the Hall. "I will _not_ let it go, James Potter," he snapped, "because it is--" The next part he shouted at the Slytherin table at the top of his voice. "--_sick and wrong_, and I _will not stand for it_!" He was on his feet now, his eyes hard, his face set, every muscle in his body angled for confrontation.

A cluster of Slytherins directly across from him rose together like a waterspout, like a black mist gathering over sunlit hills, a dark presence spattered with silver and green. Remus saw Regulus Black among them--so like Sirius, cast so closely in his image, and yet somehow so distant.

"Then, by all means," Severus Snape replied, his voice ringing with derision, a smirk of colossal proportions pulling his lips, "sit down."

Remus expected smoke to pour from Sirius's ears. But by the time the teachers had gained their feet mere seconds later, Sirius was striding down the aisle toward the exit, robes swirling around his ankles, footsteps echoing in the silence. Tendons shifted visibly in his back as he gave the doors a monumental shove imbued with improbable strength, and they gave way at his bidding. Out Sirius went.

The hush was shattered by the protesting squeals of the bench as Remus, James, and Peter pushed it backwards and leapt off of it to scramble after Sirius at a run. A wave of uproarious laughter from the Slytherins ushered them from the Hall, and the doors swung shut with unfeeling finality after them.

At risk of losing his figurative language privileges indefinitely, Remus realized that he felt like his heart had been put through a cheese grater with painstaking completeness. It wasn't bad enough that the seven innocent Muggles had fallen to a force they couldn't even see, couldn't even _believe_ in, to resist. It wasn't bad enough that four of those Muggles had been children--_children_, who might have had long, wonderful lives, who might have grown up to cure cancer or write a bestseller or just settle down with a spouse and two kids and a garden in the backyard that would grow nothing but zucchini, which the kids would hide in their napkins instead of eating. No, that wasn't bad enough. The Slytherins had to smirk, had to laugh, had to crow out their triumph, had to gloat over a tragedy as a victory. They had to light Sirius's short, short fuse.

Sirius Black was the flagship of their little fleet, and they all knew it. James might have been smarter than him, strictly speaking, and more gleefully mischievous. But Sirius had more strength, more blind, steely conviction, and endless supplies of passion. He was passionate about everything and about nothing, about the tiny things and the tremendous ones, and it was that passion that compelled him in all that he did. Likely that was why so many girls had faded in his eyes--when the short chase was over and they were his, they weren't quite amazing enough to sustain the reckless passion with which he had wanted them. Remus wondered if anything was--if anything in the world could balance that incredible weight. Maybe _they_ could--and maybe they did. The three of them. Him, and James, and Peter. Sirius loved them, that much was evident and undeniable. Remus was of the tentative belief that Sirius loved them more than he'd ever loved anything. It was a little bit of a scary thought.

They followed the shadowy figure, stiff with the radiating force of his ire, to the third floor. There, on a long carpet, he stopped, possibly because he had exerted at least some of his animosity on the two sets of stairs up which he had just stormed. Sure enough, he was panting a little, though the will for destruction was still written in plain letters across his face.

"Sirius, listen a minute," James began.

"_No_, James," Sirius retorted. "_You_ listen a minute. You saw the bastard. You _saw_ the bastard. You saw all those bastards, sitting pretty over there, grinning like monkeys with vampire teeth. They _laugh_ in the face of human suffering, James Potter. They _encourage_ it. And when that's not enough, they go out and do it themselves. How many do you think are on the nameless one's side now? How many people we've made fun of in Potions or jinxed for the Hell of it are moonlighting as murderers? Give me a fucking estimate, why don't you?" But he didn't give James or anyone else a chance to speak before he took it up again, rancor dripping from every pore; Remus, his olfactory abilities better than most as a side effect of his monthly transformations, almost thought he could smell Sirius's hatred; he imagined he could see it coalescing into a thin, wispy stream and curling around its master like an obedient snake, like a whirlwind, like a tornado with Sirius Black at its eye. "Fucking Nazis," Sirius snarled, pacing furiously now, kicking vengefully at the rug when it thickness impeded his feet. "They're fucking _Nazis_. And Severus--he's the worst of them. The _worst_. The bastard--the absolute _bastard_." Severus was actively seething now, his breath hissing between his teeth. "Oh, he'll get his fucking comeuppance. He will. He'll get what's coming to him. Complacent little fucker. No, my dear friends, you can't talk like that to Sirius Black and get away unscathed. He'll get his."

He looked up then, and he seemed almost surprised that they were there.

"I'm hungry," Peter said.

"I'm not going back in there," Sirius warned, the rage rising in his voice again.

"You don't have to," Peter responded, a lackadaisical shrug lifting his shoulders. "I'll go and bring you something back if you like. I can bring everybody something back, if you guys want."

The acquiescence was muted but universal, and Peter smiled, clicked his heels together and saluted sharply, and then strolled back along the corridor, skipping down the stairs.

"Good kid," James remarked, wearily it seemed.

"Sirius," Remus said slowly, making himself look levelly into Sirius's dark eyes. They were brothers now. They had been since the day years ago when those three saints had declared that they would try at any cost, that they would endeavor until they succeeded, that they would become Animagi--that they would do the impossible, and they would do it for him. They were brothers, the four of them, brothers linked by irrevocable ties stronger than blood, but there were limits to it--limits to brotherhood. There were limits to everything. "Why do you hate Severus?" Remus asked. Sirius opened his mouth, incensed by the very question, but Remus cut him off. "I don't mean," he clarified distinctly, "why you think he's petty and cruel and whatever else he is that's largely unequivocal. I mean, Sirius, why do you hate him so _personally_?"

There was a long moment of silence. James looked bewilderedly between Remus and Sirius as they met each other's eyes. And then Sirius smiled, a thin, horrible smile of untold anguish.

"Because," Sirius answered calmly, "Severus Snape is everything my family ever wanted me to be." That smile cut like a knife, and Remus felt himself flinch. "And I'm not."


	4. Godless

_Author's Note: Hope you're having a lovely time so far. I know I am. Sorry for all the interludes with other characters, given that I promised a Remus story... There's just so much to tell..._

* * *

**CHAPTER FOUR**

**Godless**

Severus tried to ignore the avid snores emanating from the boy two beds over and the incoherent mumbling coming from the one next to him. He did sometimes halfheartedly wonder if he should go to the nurse and broach the subject of insomnia.

But he hated talking to other people about himself.

And surely it was purely psychological--psychosomatic. Wasn't everything, at some level? So his mind raced, endlessly, fervidly, a frightened hamster on an oiled wheel, when he tried to lay down to sleep. That didn't mean he needed _medication_. He didn't trust the stuff anyway.

Maybe he'd do some private research, when he had some time. If he ever had some time.

As the odious harmony of his roommates' infernal slumbering serenaded him where he lay wide-eyed and wakeful, staring moodily at the canopy of his bed, Severus's mind wandered.

Some people's minds--or, at least, so he surmised, not having any concrete proof one way or the other--meandered placidly from subject to subject, pausing to examine some interesting ideas more closely, glossing over others, turning a proverbial nose up at the truly boring matters and strolling past them indifferently. And if that was the connotation of a wandering mind, then Severus's didn't wander at all. It ran marathons.

There was an urgency to the rushing, and his brain plumbed every item in its reach to an exhausting depth--but never exhausting enough to send him drifting pleasantly to sleep. No, there was a paradoxical aspect to it: his mind was indefatigably capable of exhausting itself.

God.

Except that Severus didn't believe in God. Or, rather, he was frustrated with the fact that he couldn't be sure whether he should believe in God or not, and he had vindictively decided that if some great, supreme, overarching deity did exist, He was one mean son of a bitch.

Severus's mind was, at that particular moment, linking his agnosticism with last summer and scurrying over the rickety bridge thus created.

"Jesus Christ," his father had said, vehemently. But then, his father said everything vehemently.

"Tobias--"

"See, that's the first problem with you people. You're _godless_. You're a lot of blaspheming, sorcerous morons who think you can go around spending that ridiculous money of yours like there's no tomorrow--"

Severus attempted to brush his teeth louder. The house was very small, which put the bathroom very close to his parents' bedroom. Since the 11:30 PM argument was a nightly feature, consistent within a margin of twenty minutes on either side, Severus had devised a few different strategies for drowning out the voices.

None of them worked.

"Tobias, _please_--"

"_No_, Eileen. Would you shut your fat mouth for two minutes and _listen_? That--_boy_--of yours--"

"He's your son, too, Tobias, in case you'd _forgotten_." The venom in her voice was almost visible in the air as a roiling cloud of a noxious green. Once a Slytherin, always a Slytherin.

"Oh, like Hell he is. Seen him lately, Eileen? Seen him lurking around the house like an axe murderer?"

"You've lost your mind--"

"Seen him hunched over those molding books? I told him to go outside and expose himself to the _sun_ for once in his life, and you know what he told me? Go on, ask what he told me."

Eileen Prince Snape's voice was scathingly caustic. "What did he tell you?"

"He told me he was _busy_. In a tone like I'd intruded on some sacred ritual. Christ Almighty, do you people think that's _acceptable_ or something?"

Severus's mother was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet and tired. Severus's only ally had given up on him, like she always did. "He's not perfect," Eileen conceded wearily.

"You're damn right he's not," Tobias Snape snorted. "That's what you people do to a kid. Rip his soul to pieces. You lot are going straight to Hell."

"Don't be _vulgar_--"

"_Vulgar_? You know what's _vulgar_, Eileen? Seeing your son for just a few months in summer is _vulgar_. Having him come back with his head crammed full of magical bullshit is _vulgar_." Tobias's wife started to interrupt, and he raised his voice dangerously close to a shout to talk over her. "You _know_ what's vulgar, Eileen Prince? Trying to have a relationship with your son and getting nothing but spite and sarcasm is _vulgar_."

Eileen's temper flared like a bonfire roaring into life. "Well, maybe if you didn't tell him to buck up and be active and call him stupid and--what was it you said today?--_sullen_, he wouldn't have a perfectly good reason to hate you."

"_Hate_ me? Does the snippy little bastard presume to--"

"How dare you talk about your own son that way?"

"Oh, _spare_ me, woman. You act like he's some sort of saint. Here's news for you--that couldn't be farther from the truth if you tried. Your little bookworm's got a nasty streak a mile wide. The sooner he's out of my house, the better."

"This from the man who deplores the yearly absence of his son?"

"Don't talk to me like that--"

"Don't _you_ talk to _me_ like--"

Severus closed his eyes for a full ten seconds. He opened them again. _Sullen,_ he thought, almost absently. The words were like a sheet of heated metal that his mind was reflexively too smart to touch. _Presumptuous. Godless._

He went into his bedroom, closed the door securely, and attended his single vanity--his phonograph.

He lay down on his bed and folded his long-fingered hands on his chest as the needle slid through the groove and the exquisite notes of the second movement of the Ninth Symphony reached his waiting ears. Beethoven had been entirely deaf by the time he'd written it, but not even that could quell the man's genius. Severus knew magnificence when he saw it--or, rather, heard it. He closed his eyes again and listened only to the swelling grandeur of the audible brilliance.

In the dorm at Hogwarts, Severus tried to imagine that the rustlings and mutterings of his obligatory comrades were a musical oeuvre of comparable magnificence.

It was impossible. Moreover, even the attempt was an act of unforgivable idiocy. No, they would not go away.

He tried to listen to the sound of his own breathing, to calm himself by focusing on its gentle consistency. But that, naturally, was even worse.

He hated the sound of his breathing. It reminded him that he was alive when everyone around him would have preferred him to be dead. It was one more way in which he disappointed them. He might have decided to hold his breath symbolically, pretending he could die that way, but that if he had indulged in the puerile gesture, when his oxygen ran out, he would have lapsed into unconsciousness, and his body would have recommenced breathing automatically.

His physical form was uncooperative that way. It aimed to ensure the continuation of its own existence, which wasn't quite so high on Severus's list of priorities.

Pointless. Just like everything else.

When he did sleep, as eventually happened after hours of reviewing his life, reconsidering his homework, and despising his neighbors, sometimes he dreamed of killing himself. He would take one of the small, sharp, shining razors they used to chop materials in Potions, and with it, he would trace his way up the thin blue veins that stood out so eerily against the paler-than-illness skin of his wrists. And then, willingly, obligingly, eagerly, the blood would flow free--gushing, coursing, frothing; running out in rivers and oceans and universes; sluicing forth, loosed from its confines at last, liberated from its duties to preserve the sullen, presumptuous, godless soul it had reluctantly nurtured for almost seventeen long years. And Severus sat, then, in his dream; he sat back and closed his eyes and waited, and he felt more at peace than he had ever felt before.

Waking up was always a tremendous disappointment.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Remus wasn't quite sure what to make of James's uneasiness and Sirius's ineffaceable thin smile. He wasn't too inclined to mull over it, given that the more he tried to think, the more his head ached like an anvil at the mercy of an overzealous blacksmith. It was always like this on full moon days. It made homework a terrible chore--well, more of a terrible chore than usual.

The blithe gold of afternoon had faded into the smooth pastels of sunset, the clouds painted in sweeping strokes of orange and violet. Remus winced as he stood, his knees protesting the way he'd been sitting on the floor, and the others looked up.

"Ready to go?" Sirius inquired cheerfully. "Very good. No time like the present."

"Sirius--" James began.

"Off we go, Remus," Sirius sang happily, throwing an arm around his friend's shoulders and ignoring James's attempted protest. Grinning, Peter pushed the portrait hole open for them and stepped back like a porter, bowing them out.

"Sirius, I really don't think--"

"James, my boy, I don't give a flying fuck what you think," Sirius replied pleasantly.

James was on his feet now, fists clenched. "_Listen_, you arrogant _bastard_--"

"James?" a new voice interjected tentatively. Lazily, Sirius turned. Remus didn't hesitate to follow suit as best as he could, looking around Sirius's arm.

It was Lily.

Hesitantly she smiled. "If you're not busy, James, we could get working on that plan I was telling you about in class today..."

A few seconds passed, tightrope taut, with James glancing back and forth between Sirius's eyebrows, raised mockingly high on his aristocratic forehead, and Lily's endlessly innocent face, which betrayed her bewilderment transparently. Then he looked pointedly to her and announced, slowly and clearly, "Yes, Lily. I'd love to help you."

Sirius slammed the portrait on James's great show of sitting down and looking at the parchment Lily had set down on the table. Calmly he disregarded the lecture that sailed after him as the Fat Lady began reprimanding him roundly for his carelessness. The unshakeable smile on his face was an odd one--cold and slightly bitter.

"He'll come around," Sirius decided.

"Come around to what?" Remus dared.

"No need to fret your pretty little head about that," the other boy answered, ruffling Remus's hair with gusto. "All's well that ends well, I say. Shakespeare agrees with me, mind you, and that's all that matters." There was an unusual earnestness and an unwonted quickness to his long stride, and Remus had to take a step and a half for each of his. Whatever Sirius had said, desperate worries flooded into Remus's mind, twirling through it, mummifying his constitution as they danced around it, making a maypole out of his confidence.

At least _that_ was familiar territory.

They were running late today. He'd been slow to finish his work, slow to drag himself to his feet, slow to succumb to his weakness once again, and the business with James had only delayed them more. Barely had Remus emerged from the tunnel into the Shack, barely had he had time to reflect through the throbbing of his head how hollow it seemed without James, when the moonlight streamed through the window, and it began.

He was drowning; he was dying; he was being burned, buried, crucified. How could anything hurt so much without killing?

Remus Lupin pulled his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them tightly as the skin bubbled and burst into fur, as the joints cracked, as the smell of the dust and decay slammed into his suddenly heightened senses, and screamed.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

James tried to listen. He really did. But he couldn't.

"...that sounded about right..."

He'd seen the note Sirius had slipped onto Severus's desk. He'd read it when it had first been written, and he had laughed--laughed because he thought it was a fine joke.

And only as a joke was it remotely acceptable.

"...you and Remus could take that bit..."

_"If you're so intent on sticking that freakishly large nose of yours into Remus's business,"_ the note had read, _"why don't you follow him tonight and press the knot on the Willow with a stick? (And if you can't find one of those, the aforementioned nose would certainly suffice.)"_

He'd signed it lavishly, grandly--_Sirius Black_, embellishments dripping from it like blood.

"...beginning to doubt you're even listening..."

They could get caught. They could get exposed. They could get expelled. Severus could get bitten or even die. Or he could go around telling his friends that Remus Lupin was a werewolf, and, in some ways, that would be worse.

Every year, minutes before the train was to leave, James's mother would give him a great, huge hug, and, every year, she would whisper something in his ear as she did--some tidbit, some small piece of advice. When he was younger, it had been intended to make him smile: "Always have an extra pair of socks" in his first year, before he had any friends, and "Chew with your mouth closed if there are girls around" in his second. This year, her breath had tickled his ear something awful as she'd remarked almost airily, "If you doubt even for a moment that it's right, then it probably isn't."

He planted his hands flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet. Lily's beautiful eyes narrowed, and her beautiful voice trailed off, partly uncertainly, partly indignantly.

"I'm very sorry," he said, and he meant it, "but I have to go."

Without waiting for an answer, he ran.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

_The rat scuttles around somewhere. The rat is inconsequential._

_The dog pants happily, tongue lolling out of its mouth. He barks once, as if there is something he wishes to convey._

_There is no time to puzzle out his meaning. The wolf plunges into the dimness of the earthen tunnel, the acrid scents left by its denizens clear and distinct. It isn't them he seeks. The other end of the tunnel opens, and a boy peers in, laced in the smells of his interest, his excitement, and a tantalizing hint of fear._

_He murmurs something, and the tip of his wand nourishes a steady white light._

_With a growl that begins deep in the cavern of his chest, a growl that builds like a thunderstorm, the wolf surges forward._

_A strangled cry works its way free of the boy's throat, his face bloodlessly pale in the light of the wand, and he scrambles away, dislodging dirt that tumbles down like rain._

_Then he is jerked backwards, and then he is gone, and there is only the silken moon lingering low in the darkening sky._

_The wolf bounds after his disappeared prey, but the tunnel whisks shut before him. He hesitates, lifting one front paw and then the other indecisively. He can hear them, he can smell them, these boys, but he cannot reach them._

_"You - wh - Potter!"_

_"Get _out_ - run, you bloody idiot!"_

_The wolf raises a paw and claws at the wooden barrier. He gnaws at it with his teeth._

_"You _planned_ this! You _planned_ for this to happen!"_

_"Will you just _go_?"_

_"I'm going to kill you, James Potter." There is a ring of chilling certainty to the words. "I am going to watch you die."_

_"Yes, that's very nice; now, will you _go_?"_

_Footfalls depart. The wolf whines and scratches harder at the wall between him and the escaping boy._

_He is so very hungry._


	5. Tempting

_Author's Note: I don't own the song referenced within, of course. And it was actually released in 1978, so, strictly speaking, it shouldn't exist in this fic. But you'll see why I had to keep it. It was too good to miss._

_Long-distance virtual hug to swiftlystarlit for being 110 percent there with me on this one._

_Shazam!_

* * *

**CHAPTER FIVE**

**Tempting**

The Three Broomsticks was pretty much empty at eight o'clock on a Saturday morning, since the Hogwarts crowd generally didn't flock to Hogsmeade until lunchtime. In addition, Rosmerta usually had errands to run to prepare for the noon rush, which made the little pub a perfect temporary Marauder headquarters.

Usually there was a lot of laughter and a little too much butterbeer. Today the lack of levity pressed hard against Remus's ears. He worried away at a bit of something stuck to the counter and applied his cleaning rag liberally to every surface that looked like it remotely needed wiping. He was on his shift, after all. And it was a good excuse not to look at the three boys sitting silently at a table nearby.

It was James who mustered up the will to break the silence. "I just didn't want anyone to get hurt," he said.

"And you were right not to," Sirius responded equably, promptly, as if he had been waiting for an opportunity to speak the words. He plucked a wrapper off of the table and crinkled it between his thumb and his forefinger. Lupin couldn't help but feel disappointed in whoever had closed up last night--_he_ wouldn't have let that slip. "If dear Snivellus had been injured and lived to tell the tale, we'd have been in deep shit. And if he _hadn't_ lived, we'd have been in even deeper."

"I understand the temptation to try," James conceded quietly.

"Perhaps temptation exists," Sirius remarked, watching the light spark off of the plastic in his hand, "solely for us to find the strength to resist it."

"You sound like a fortune cookie," Peter decided. When Sirius and James gave him nothing more than a matching pair of blank expressions, he sighed. "It's a Muggle thing. Chinese food. Y'know."

Remus smiled behind his hand.

Right on cue, just as the minute hand of the clock on the wall racheted up to mark high noon, a large group of students funneled in through the door. Rosmerta hadn't yet returned, and Remus was beset on all sides by orders and demands, calls for some item or another that emanated first from one side of the room and then from the other. At least, he reflected, it was good exercise.

By twelve-fifteen, the chaos had abated enough for Remus to lean against the counter and survey his handiwork. It was then that he noticed that Lily Evans and Noelle Cook, a pretty Ravenclaw girl with ringlets the color of melted chocolate, had joined his friends. Noelle, of course, was flirting with Sirius, who flirted right back, and Lily had mustered up another list of tasks for James to review. James was in the process of reviewing her eyebrows, by the look of things. Remus found it rather amusing that James hadn't figured out that Lily came up with lists specifically so that he would have to put his face next to hers and look at them. James was probably the _only _person who hadn't figured it out.

The bell on the door jingled before his half-idea about very pointedly setting a single drink with two straws in front of them could fully form, and he looked up. Had he been facing the mirror, he would have seen a bit of color leach from his face.

As the knot of Slytherins oozed in, the other patrons paused, looked, and then recommenced their conversations at a lower volume, moving a little bit closer together. Remus saw Severus in the middle of the group, sliding through them like vinegar over oil. And Remus knew that, whatever else there was to say about him, Severus Snape did not belong there, lumped in with the thugs and the murderers. He was better than that.

Or so Remus hoped. Naïveté was one of his failings.

Severus's midnight black eyes panned over the scene calmly until they lighted on the glint of coppery hair that betrayed Lily Evans's presence. Then they narrowed precipitously until they were little more than dark slits. Severus glanced at James. He glanced at Remus. He glanced at his friends--or, rather, his cohorts. Then he glanced at Sirius, pursed his lips, and began to whistle loudly.

If you'd selected a dozen Sixth Year Hogwarts students at random and asked them which of their peers could whistle fit to knock them off their feet, none of them would have guessed Severus Snape. But, as the congregation within the Three Broomsticks was fast discovering, it was him.

It was an astonishing sound, high and clear, and at first Remus only listened with a muddled emotion that his mind puzzled out to be something in the area of grudging admiration.

Then he focused more closely on the tune, and he realized that it was a song that Peter had played for them just weeks ago, laughing all the while at the glorious irony: "Werewolves of London," by Warren Zevon.

Sirius was already leaping to his feet, a frown cutting into his face, splashed across his aristocrat's features like a stain, and Peter and James grabbed an arm each and jerked him back down into his chair. Remus felt himself coloring, felt his cheeks going hot, and he wished they wouldn't, because Noelle Cook was setting bright blue eyes on him right at that moment; he could just see them at the edge of his vision, and he wished she wouldn't pick _now_; he just wanted a hole in the ground to open up beneath him, and he could be buried alive there, which was slightly preferable to drowning, and Sirius and James would throw flowers at each other at his funeral--

Riding a wave of pure willpower, he forced himself to smile politely at the newcomers and ask them if he could get them anything.

"Doubtful," Severus commented, his lip curling. "It would probably be contaminated."

Remus chose not to hear the words; chose not to feel the barbs pierce his skin; chose not to let the venom slither through his veins. Maintaining his cordial smile, he drew the wet rag over the counter in a wide, sweeping circle.

"Well," he said, "thank you for stopping by."

Severus looked like he wanted to spit on the floor and was refraining from doing so only because it was beneath his dignity. He contented himself with following the others out.

Darkly, Sirius strung together a series of expletives to describe the interruption. James looked pained, Lily looked frustrated, Noelle looked at Sirius, and Peter--well, Peter was looking at Remus and shrugging helplessly.

In lieu of any better response, Remus shrugged back.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Remus fought to stay awake. He had started out sitting on the couch in the common room with some homework spread on his lap. Gradually he had slipped and sunk and shifted until he was really just lying down, the book sprawled over his chest like a favorite pet, his quill dangling precariously from the unsteady grip of a few listless fingers. Gravity was making a pretty solid case for the surrender of his eyelids.

Or it was until Sirius's rook hit him squarely in the side of the head.

"Getting a wee bit sleepy, Remus, my boy?" Sirius inquired cheerfully, his cheeky grin a mile wide.

"Not anymore," he groaned, trying to move. The quill bounced to the carpet, spattering ink everywhere.

"Look what you've made him do!" James protested indignantly. He was grinning, too. "Da poor baby's dwopped his wittle quilly, and it's _all your fault_!"

Peter moved a bishop, breathless with laughter. Promptly Sirius took it, his eyes lit from within.

"The perfect distraction," he drawled contentedly.

Alternately rubbing his head and trying to dab the ink out of the rug with his tattered handkerchief, Remus grinned at him ruefully. "Might I request a pawn next time?"

"Permission to request prospective weaponry denied," Sirius responded.

James rolled his eyes. "That's not very nice of you, Sergeant Black."

Sirius threw Peter's bishop at him. James shouted and tried to twist out of the way, but he wasn't fast enough, and the tiny, soaring figure rebounded neatly off of his chest.

"Scoundrel!" James cried indignantly. "Cad! _Rapscallion_!"

Gazing into space in mock pensiveness, Sirius weighed another captured piece meaningfully, turning it over in his fingers. "What do you think, Corporal Pettigrew?" he asked. "Shall I smash those pretentious little spectacles of his next?"

Though he drew himself up loftily, James looked a little too harried for his next proclamation to be convincing. "I," he declared imperiously, "am above this frivolous flippancy." He stalked up to the dorm and stalked back down again momentarily with a canvas bag thrown over his shoulder. When he paused to cast a haughty glance at them over his shoulder, Sirius raised an eyebrow--and a hand laden with a new projectile. Making a face, James darted out the portrait hole and slammed it safely shut behind him.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

James loved the prefect bathroom. Really, though. How could you _not_?

He found the faucet with the lavender bubbles and turned it on full-blast.

"Back so soon?" the mermaid in the painting crooned, watching him through her eyelashes.

"You know me," James replied, grinning, as he shrugged off his shirt and dropped it onto the pile of his clothing. He folded his glasses and tossed them on top. "I'm a dirty boy."

It was on the way back, with his hair dripping and everything smelling of lavender, that he heard the soft, muffled sobbing. Pausing, he turned, looking around, droplets spraying wildly in all directions, until he narrowed the source of the sound to the place just behind the statue at his right, a statue of a stern, scholarly-looking man that someone had crowned with a daisy chain. In its shadow a figure huddled, the figure of a girl with her knees pulled up against her chest, her head bowed low, her visage hidden in her hands. When he knelt carefully and put a hand gently on the trembling shoulder, the face it belonged to lifted.

It was Lily Evans.

Tears streaked her cheeks like rain down a windowpane.

"Wh--" he began.

With one arm, she rubbed at her face with her sleeve, and her free hand thrust at him a piece of paper folded in half.

Disoriented, he opened it, and the newspaper clipping inside fluttered as he caught a breath. _Three Muggles Dead; One Missing_, this one proclaimed. Beneath it, in a cruel travesty of a finger-painting, someone had written messily in what looked like sludge, _You're next, Mudblood_.

A tidal wave of rage rose in James's chest, burning, roaring, seeking release, and his eyes searched the words again, willing them to disappear, trying to incinerate them and erase them from existence.

Then Lily heaved a racking sob, and the fight went out of him. Desolately he sat down on the floor at her side, pushing the loathsome parchment away, and put both arms around her.

"It'll be okay," he whispered, barbed wire coiling around his heart. "Somehow..."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Dark Lord had seen his potential - had seen how intelligent he was, how committed and how diligent. And why shouldn't Severus Snape put all of himself into everything he attempted? He had nothing to lose. And so the Dark Lord had offered him a place, as no one else had ever seen fit to do, and had expressed his approval and his high hopes, which was an even rarer event. Severus had vacillated and asked for some time to evaluate the idea properly, and the Dark Lord had granted him that mercy. A man whose face he hadn't seen had murmured in his ear a caveat - a warning that the Dark Lord did not smile upon ambivalence.

Well, it didn't take a genius to figure that one out. Who did?

Still, days later, the chill of the encounter fading quickly, Severus wavered. It was tempting. The Dark Lord had given him a promise - a promise that he would never be stepped on again. He knew that it was the only thing Severus wanted, the only thing he craved at his core. That was where the Dark Lord's true power was--in his promises.

The man--if you could call something so cold, so pale, and so soulless a man--had asked for him, had _sought him out_. Surely this was it, this was the moment at which the world had decided at last to treat him kindly. Surely this was the beginning of a new trend, of a new life, of a new generousness from fate's and from chance's machinations, from their cruel dual contrivances, from their pitiless whims. Surely this was the doorway to happiness... That was another of their sneering jokes, wasn't it? As if Severus Snape knew what the word "happiness" meant.

He knew that that was a lie. He knew.

And he knew, Severus Snape knew as well as anyone, as well as any chin-raising, self-aggrandizing Gryffindor, the difference between right and wrong. Sometimes it wasn't clear-cut, wasn't black and white, wasn't easy to see. This time it was. Nevertheless the darkness was tempting. He couldn't give in to that temptation. That was what everyone expected of him, wasn't it? How could he give them that satisfaction, that chance to gloat, seeing him fall into their lazily assured predictions? How could he turn his back on what he knew was the good? What would she--

And Severus smiled, a small, thin, brittle, endlessly horrible smile. It didn't matter. It would never matter again, because she wouldn't care. Didn't care. Would never care.

He was resolved.


	6. Infinite

_Author's Note: This fic wouldn't be possible without the dulcet compositions of Beethoven, Mozart, and A.F.I. Credit where it's due._

_More props to swiftlystarlit for being this fic's unequivocal number one fan!_

_Now, if only I had a plot..._

_I'm really pleased with this chapter. I hope you are, too._

* * *

**CHAPTER SIX**

**Infinite**

"I told her I'd be more than willing to go with her," James was saying, "but she said she didn't want to do it like that. She said that'd be giving in." His eyes were unfocused, and he toyed almost compulsively with his Prefect badge. It was late, and they were doing one last patrol of the corridors to make sure that nothing was amiss. "She said she didn't need and didn't want a bodyguard." He paused, and there was a hint of an entreaty in his next words. "I guess it was just a matter of principle."

"It's nothing personal," Remus told him, partly because it was what James wanted to hear, partly because he was fairly sure it was true. "She just doesn't want it to seem like being Muggleborn should make anything different, even now--especially now."

James sighed. "I just... I feel like safety should come before pride."

Remus wavered. "I think 'pride' is too strong a--" He paused. He'd heard something.

"A wh..." James trailed off. He'd heard it, too.

Following the sound of the piteous cries at a run, Remus and James skidded to a stop in the bathroom just down the hall, gaping at the pair of grinning Slytherins watching a small girl writhing under what had to be the Cruciatus Curse. The two faces above the green and silver ties glanced up in surprise as the door slammed shut behind the newcomers.

"Take the left," Remus told James breathlessly.

He didn't wait for a nod, but they understood each other well enough to shout "_Expelliarmus_!" in perfect unison, wand arms outstretched, each with a different target.

The Slytherins, who had started to raise their wands to retaliate, found themselves weaponless.

His voice breaking, James cried, "_Petrificus Totalus_!"

When nothing happened, with a helpless anger darkening his face, James cleared his throat and tried again. This time, it worked. Jamming his wand into his belt, he grabbed a Slytherin arm in either hand and dragged the transgressors to the door, trying to keep his head low in an effort to prevent anyone from seeing the tears sparking in his eyes.

"Going to--gonna' get these two--two--" James shook them hard by their shoulders, as if _they_ were making the words choke him. "--_bastards_ expelled."

Remus nodded his assent and, as the door swung closed after them, tentatively approached the sobbing girl curled up under the sinks. Water dripped from the leaking pipes onto her huddled body, but she seemed to ignore it. Very gently, Remus put a hand on her shoulder.

"They'll be taken care of," he assured her softly. "It's over now."

She looked up at him, and he discovered a round, innocent face soaked with tears and a pair of big, watery blue eyes. A festive Hufflepuff scarf lay sodden and forlorn in a puddle of water on the floor.

"No," she whispered. "It's only beginning."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Even days later, even when the offenders had been cast out from the castle forever, even when order and quiescence had, at least outwardly, been restored, Remus had trouble sleeping. It was the faces that did it--the faces that swam before his eyes like phantoms in the night.

The older Slytherin boy was seventeen--fully legal, which meant he was looking at a comfortable stint in Azkaban for performing an Unforgivable. He had a long face, pale and a little secretive. His hair was dark and rather disorderly, his eyebrows bushy like overgrown hedges, his chin sharply-defined and somehow abrupt. He had wonderful eyes--beautiful ones, a marbled bluish-green with rings of faint yellow around the pupils.

The other boy was younger, making expulsion the worst punishment he could expect. He was shorter than his companion, and more strongly built, with the kind of accomplished smirk that spoke volumes of overconfidence. There was a roguish tilt to his features that would have left girls swooning, and when he walked, it was more of a saunter.

And the girl--Remus had quickly learned her name. Anna Blythe was a Second Year Hufflepuff--Muggleborn, and she had paid for it dearly.

The persistent memory of her face drenched in mortified tears was bad--but it was the calmness in her every feature when she had sat in a bed in the Hospital Wing, letting Remus hold her hand tightly, and explained precisely how the Cruciatus Curse had felt that haunted him nightly without fail.

Madame Pomfrey hadn't really known what to do with Anna when Remus had brought her in, loosing a current of hasty explanations even as he did. Hesitantly Pomfrey had arranged her in a cheery bed and given her a cup of tea and some chocolate. She had heartily encouraged Remus when he proposed that he might stay awhile to keep Anna company.

Anna hadn't wasted much time.

"You know what it felt like?" she inquired. When he'd only shaken his head mutely, she'd nodded reflectively to herself. "They just say it's the worst pain you can imagine. I guess it's different for everyone." She had looked at him coolly, composedly. He felt horror plant itself in his heart, its roots beginning to push through every vein. "For me, at least, it was a few different stages. Every time I thought it was as bad as it could get, and then it would get worse." Her wide blue eyes blinked serenely and went on to contemplate the ceiling bemusedly. "First it was a lot of twisting and pulling, the kind of thing your brother'll do to you if he's in a bad mood--but magnified, of course. Yanking your arms off, all that. Then it was knives. If you'd asked me, I would have told you there were real knives, here, and here, and here and here--" She indicated places on her body with her unencumbered hand. She might have freed the encumbered one and used it as well if Remus hadn't been gripping it so hard. "And they stabbed and then twisted. But the last part was the worst. It would have to be. It wouldn't make sense otherwise, because you'd think, 'Oh, this isn't so bad as last time,' and that would ruin it. The last part was just like being burned alive. I knew I was lying in water, that there was water dripping from the sinks everywhere, but I couldn't even feel it." She paused. "I think being burned alive is the worst way to die."

With difficulty Remus overcame the knot in his throat. "I think so, too."

"Maybe I'll quit this school and go home," Anna remarked. "It seems like that's what they want from me anyway."

Remus wondered if the sudden vacuum in his chest, into which the cold surged with a vengeance, meant that his heart had broken.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It was somewhat glumly that Remus trooped down to the fifth floor. When he reached the appropriate door, he mumbled, "Infinite wisdom." His forehead furrowed a little as the door continued to sit placidly, unmoving and unmoved. It was the right password. Placing a hand on the door handle confirmed, however, that it was locked from within, ergo that someone else was inside.

Absently Remus kicked at the carpet while he waited, pacing back and forth a bit. Everything just felt so... so...

The door opened, and Noelle Cook emerged, still toweling contentedly at her shining curls. To Remus's greeting, she returned a quick smile that didn't reach her bright eyes before striding off purposefully down the hall. He watched her go for a moment before setting his shoulders grimly and going in.

Remus didn't really like the prefect bathroom. It was big, wide-open, and kind of intimidating. Plus there was that mermaid--

"How are you this evening, dear?" she cooed.

"Fine, thanks," Remus answered, using his best Unerringly Polite Voice. "And you?"

"Lovely, lovely," she averred. "That friend of yours really likes the lavender."

That sounded very much like James.

"Hmm," Remus said, trying to sound interested. Skirting the wet footprints that clearly delineated the path Noelle had taken, he selected a towel and set it carefully at the edge of the massive sunken bathtub, which was currently emptying Noelle's water through three different drains, making tiny triplet whirlpools. That done, Remus turned a few faucets on at random--it really didn't matter, as far as he was concerned--and sat down at the edge to wait. Alternately he watched the flaring flames of the myriad candles in the great chandelier and the rising water in the tub, which flowed from a different set of pipes embedded in its walls. The bubbles were splashing down loudly enough to drown out any further advances from the mermaid. That was nice, at least.

Before long, the massive basin was full. Remus twisted the disturbed faucets' handles again, and the current of bubbles slowed and then ceased, leaving the room in almost cemetery-like silence but for the soft snapping of bubbles bursting at random and the hollow, distant sound of water running through the plumbing in the walls.

Hating his own stupid modesty, Remus had to hesitate a moment before he could muster up the courage to strip off his vest and unbutton his shirt. Procrastinating inexcusably, watching the coquettish mermaid suspiciously out of the corner of his eye, he folded his abandoned clothing meticulously and then sat down to remove his shoes and his socks. It was as he was arranging them that the flash of silver-white darted past at the edge of his vision.

Immediately he was on his feet, his heart pounding in his ears, a single droplet of cold sweat slithering insidiously down his spine. His eyes probed the dimness left by the fickle light, the shadows in the corners; frantically and futilely he cursed the unreliability of the candles in the chandelier--

"Oh," Moaning Myrtle said unhappily. "I thought it might be Sirius."

Remus stared at her, and then he sat down at the edge of the bathtub again, taking a deep breath and trying to slow the skittering of his heart before the unfortunate organ in question exploded from the undue strain.

"He's gorgeous, you know," Myrtle reported matter-of-factly.

"Hmm," Remus said.

There was a moment of silence broken by the dripping of one of the taps as Myrtle squinted at him as if there might be Sirius-like treasure buried beneath his ordinary exterior.

"Is something wrong?" she asked eventually.

"Everything," he corrected in a mumble, feeling pathetic and ungrateful even as he heard the word come out of his mouth. "This... Dark Lord... going around killing defenseless people... All the Slytherins in on it... Just..." Helplessly he lowered his head into his waiting hands. "I can't..."

Myrtle patted his bare shoulder with an icy hand. Goosebumps rippled down his arms. "Well, on the bright side," she remarked airily, "you're not dead."

He looked at her. She smiled back complacently.

"Um," he said. "Thanks."

Myrtle nodded at his pants. "So, are you going to take a bath or not?"

Incredulously he stared at her. "I'd rather not have an audience," he responded slowly.

"_Well_," Myrtle replied haughtily. "I can take a _hint_, you know." Miffed, and making quite a show of it, she floated off through a wall, head held high.

Remus sighed.

About twenty minutes later--he made it quick; the mermaid was unnerving him--Remus crept through the castle, his hand on his wand just in case, seeking his favorite place in the entirety of the school.

He reached it, soon enough--the long hall with the wide windows that looked out on almost endless expanses of lawn. Moonlight streamed down, lighting a star in every drop of dew, frosting the windows, bleaching the color from the carpet, shining on his face.

It wasn't long before he heard whistling--somber, stately, and impossibly accurate.

Turning partway, Remus considered leaving. It wouldn't be too difficult to flee before he was even sighted. But at the same time... No. He wasn't going to run. He was tired of running.

When Severus saw him, the whistling broke off.

"'Russian Easter Festival Overture,'" Remus noted. "Rimsky-Korsakov."

"Werewolf," Severus replied, characteristically venomously.

Apparently it passed for a salutation. Then again, it wasn't as though Remus's had been too much better.

"Yes, I know," Severus hissed, seeming to think that was why Remus paused. "I was _there_. And I suspected for a long time. I wondered. I'd have to have been a complete fool not to wonder. Do you think I'm a fool, Remus? Deep down, do you?"

"No," Remus replied quietly.

"What I can't believe," Severus seethed, almost to himself, "is that Dumbledore let you come here in the first place. It's his job--his _duty_--to protect us, to protect his students, protect us from things like _you_." It stung. It always stung. But it also ached dully like an old war wound faintly aggravated. "Evidently, he has failed at that. Senile, likely. Unleashing something like you--But what no one _sees_," Severus interrupted himself insistently, the frustration and the righteousness sonorous in his every word, "is that that's what I've been _trying_ to do all along--to protect the people who don't even see the threat."

Remus looked out the window at the lawn, bathed in moonlight. It was waning, the milky orb suspended among the sprinkled stars, but it called to him. It beckoned. It whispered his name in a voice like a sword scraping against silver. "Protect Lily, you mean," he said.

He didn't turn. He knew, with certainty, that Severus would be livid, that his eyes would narrow to ebony slashes in his white face, that his contempt would explode outward unrestrained.

"How _dare_ you even _imply_--"

"She's perfectly safe from me, Severus," Remus told him softly. "We were prefects together last year--without James, back then. Nothing ever went wrong. I've never hurt anyone. And you know James will keep her safest of all, just as you would."

The silence was complete for a full minute. Then Severus Snape spoke.

"She's the only beautiful thing I've ever had. You have to understand that."

Remus turned then, turned and met the foreign supplication in the black eyes. "I do, Severus," he said.

The wells deepened; their pleas lapped helplessly against the stone walls. "He wants me, Remus."

A concerned line appeared between Remus's eyebrows. "Who does?"

With nauseating speed, impatient anger mingled with the implorations in Severus's eyes. "_He_ does, you fool," he snapped.

And Remus understood. Slowly he shook his head. "You can't do it."

Severus's face hardened quickly--always quickly; his emotions flickered like candle flames and replaced one another almost too rapidly to follow. "And what would you have me do, Remus Lupin?" he spat. "Refuse him? _Him_? Send my condolences that I have to decline and then wait until he kills my family in recompense?" Then a mad hope was lit in his eyes, sweeping aside the spite before it. "He wants your kind, you know," Severus went on, urging, pressing. "He could do with more of you."

It was a wild hope, a strange one, and if Severus had not been so desperately afraid, Remus knew, that hope would not have existed at all. It wounded him to kill it.

"I'm not going with you, Severus," he declared quietly.

The light went out, and the darkness rushed in hungrily. "Idiot," Severus snarled.

Remus turned again and watched the shadow of a drifting cloud play across the glimmering lawn. "I know," he responded.


	7. Shattered

_Author's Note: No note! Just more Remus! You WIN!_

_Erm, actually, there is a note. I wrote much and edited all of this after an all-nighter. Self-explanatory, I think._

_Oh, and I saw the Order of the Phoenix movie today, which probably explains why it's so emo._

* * *

**CHAPTER SEVEN**

**Shattered**

There was something not-quite-right about the next Friday night. The broom wouldn't make its usual transformation into a microphone, and there was almost a bit of malevolence in the glint of the mirror over the bar. Remus was as efficient as possible going about his closing duties. He just wanted to get out. And this time, he kept all the lights on.

He had just finished sweeping the floor when he heard it--the unmistakable crash and tinkle of shattered glass.

"_Velox ventosus_," he whispered, flicking his wand. A breath of wind rushed forth from its tip and swirled around the perimeter of the room, extinguishing the candles in a single swoop. Even as the last flame flicked out of being, Remus dove behind the counter and stayed there, trying to stem his panicked breathing.

More glass smashed, closer this time, followed by an eruption of raucous laughter.

Remus bit his lip hard, looking intently at the bottles arranged in the shelves on the inside of the bar counter, memorizing details in an attempt to force himself to focus. Did he run for his life? Did he stay and protect Rosmerta's livelihood?

Or did he huddle here in indecision, wishing some benevolent higher power would sent a bolt of courage straight into him?

Then the storefront window exploded inward, and a waterfall of glass rained to the floor in a grand symphony of discord and destruction. Remus cringed, cowering lower in the corner. He'd washed that window last weekend, painstakingly. Rosmerta had been overjoyed, telling him it looked just like new.

And now it was spread out on the floor in a million glittering pieces.

The laughter burst out again, hearty and unrestrained, guttural and unsavory.

"Knock, knock," a voice called caustically. "Anybody home?"

The signature crunch of shoes on glass rang a like a death knell in Remus's ears. If he ran now, they'd see him for sure.

"There weren't any lights on, Avery." _Avery_. It sounded familiar. Did he know an Avery? "Let it go. The bitch'll be pissed enough to see her window broken."

"Yeah, well, I swore I saw lights on a minute ago."

Remus choked.

"You didn't."

"I did so."

Cold sweat ran down Remus's back in rivers.

"Well, there's no one here now. Let it go. We've got more fuckin' damage to do."

Avery didn't sound convinced, but, to Remus's giddy relief, he dropped it. "Yeah. Yeah, all right, fine." Glass crinkled and cracked under his feet again, and then two sets of footsteps faded away in the distance, punctuated occasionally by the ear-splitting demise of another storefront's wide pane of glass. Remus waited, shivering in the frigid breeze that howled in through the broken window, until there was nothing to hear but his own ragged breathing. Then he waited a little more before getting to his feet and peeking over the edge of the counter.

Shards of glass decorated the floor like confetti, all of them glinting and sparkling in the weak starlight. Dust drifted and twirled in the wind that poured in through the jagged mouth of a hole, its maw open wide and lined with razor teeth. Remus drew a few deep, steadying breaths, and then he ran.

He was panting so hard by the time he reached Gryffindor Tower that it took him three tries to gasp out the password to the Fat Lady. Clutching his protesting heart, he lurched into the common room and, as all eyes within landed upon him in astonishment, managed to choke out a few more words.

"Floo... anybody...?"

Lips pressed together, Lily jumped up from yet another list and went straight up the stairs toward her dorm. Remus had time to collapse in front of the fireplace, chest heaving, head spinning, and count to fifteen before she returned and handed him a small leather pouch filled with green powder. He dragged himself into a sitting position, struggled to wheeze something close to "Thank you," and tossed a pinch of the precious dust into the fire.

A very deep breath made his "Madame Rosmerta" mostly understandable, and then he squeezed his eyes shut and plunged his head in.

"Wh... Remus?"

A shadowy shape collected itself off of the bed and, shrugging on a bathrobe and holding it closed, knelt in front of the fireplace. Rosmerta's voluminous dark hair was in disarray, and suspicion and deep concern mingled in her eyes.

"The--the Three Broomsticks--"

"What about it?" There was a sharpness in her voice that he'd never heard before. He wanted to wilt away from it.

"These two men--they were smashing windows all down the street--"

"They broke the window?"

"They didn't take anything, but--"

"But they broke the window?"

He took another trembling breath. "Yes. Yes, they did."

Rosmerta's face hardened. "And what were you doing?"

Remus felt a hot flush of shame creeping up his cheeks. _Yes, Remus,_ he thought scathingly. _Where were _you_ while all this was going on?_ "Hiding," he answered miserably. _Yes, Ma'am,_ his mind went on cruelly as Rosmerta paused, watching him astutely. _The big, brave Gryffindor was quaking in a corner while the treasured business to which you have dedicated your life was destroyed._

To his surprise, Rosmerta then nodded slowly. "Windows," she said, "can be replaced. People can't."

It was probably the kindest thing Rosmerta had ever said to him that didn't involve Sirius. He wasn't quite sure how to react.

Fortunately, Rosmerta's face was set, and she was already getting up and moving on, tightening her robe around her. "Go ahead and get some sleep, Remus," she suggested. "I'll need help cleaning up tomorrow. I'm going to go down and lock everything up tight."

"Most of the stock was in the storeroom," he reported weakly. "Where it always goes." Vaguely he discerned that he was holding tight to the old, comforting routine, clinging to the consistency, digging his heels and fingernails into the way things had been and should be. The fragile balance had been abruptly violated, and he didn't have any idea how to clamber back onto the tilting platform again. That uncertainty sent him scuttling back to the familiar--the familiar and obsolete.

"Well done, Remus," Rosmerta said next. He blinked at her as she stood and smoothed down the front of her robe and nightgown--largely unnecessarily, as far as his bewildered eyes could see. Again she paused, and again she met his eyes a little too keenly. "Thank you, Remus," she added. "You did splendidly. Just go on keeping your head on straight and your wits about you, and you'll do fine."

Personally, Remus felt that the head that he drew out of the fireplace was screwed on backwards and upside down, and his wits seemed to be scrambled and strewn across the floor not unlike the fragments of glass had been. The mental image made the befuddled head in question ache a little more, and he put a hand to it distractedly.

"Remus," Sirius said, his voice deadly cold and quiet. "Who broke into the Three Broomsticks?"

"They didn't--didn't break _in_, exactly," Remus managed.

"Then what exactly did they do, Remus?"

"Well, they--they broke the window, but they didn't really want anything... inside..." Remus faltered. "Except--"

"Except what?"

"Except they wanted to know if there was someone there."

"Why?"

The throbbing pain in Remus's head suddenly flared, and he winced. "I don't know."

A hesitant glance confirmed that Sirius's gray eyes were on him, frozen a dark, muddled color like a murky pond in the depths of winter. "Don't give me that shit, Remus."

"Sirius--" Lily began indignantly.

"Who _were_ they?" Sirius demanded, talking over her. "And why the hell did they break the window?"

"I don't kn--"

"You going to tell me they took your memory _and_ your nerve? You must have seen _something_. Heard something."

Remus felt tears pricking his eyes and hated them--hated them almost as much as he hated himself, almost as much as he hated the truth stabbing into his ears. "I don't _know_, Sirius, all _right_?"

It was only when everyone went silent for a long moment that he realized he'd said it louder than he'd intended--a cry bordering on a shout.

Momentarily nonplussed, Sirius recovered quickly and set a hand firmly on either of Remus's shoulders, holding him fast, pinning him where he still sat, cross-legged on the floor. There was a strange and unnerving fire in Sirius's eyes now, white-hot and barely rational.

"Remus," he repeated slowly, "listen to me." He spoke as if addressing a skittish child--a comparison that came a little too close to reality for Remus's liking. "If you don't _tell_ us anything, we can't very well nail the bastards responsible, now, can we?" The humor went out of his voice when he paused, leaving it cold again when he recommenced. And yet there was something like profound and genuine worry in his turbulent eyes. "Were they Death Eaters? You must have--"

"I didn't see," Remus insisted once more, doggedly, shaking his head as if the motion might clear the ringing and cement his point at once. "I heard--all I heard was that one of them called the other 'Avery.'"

"Eugenius or Cyrus Avery?" Sirius pressed.

"I don't--"

"Cyrus was just two years ahead of us; graduated last year; you must know his voice."

"He didn't say much--"

Sirius gave him a shake, hard enough to make him feel as though the dislodged contents of his brain were tumbling haphazardly around within his skull. "You must know _something_," he went on.

"I'm sorry I'm not _you_!" Remus heard himself hurl back, jerking himself free. "I'm sorry I don't lurk around corners learning people's secrets! I'm sorry I don't know how to stop trouble only because I'm so often at the root of it! I'm sorry I'm not reckless and senseless and _mad_, like you are!" His legs had unfolded beneath him, raising him to his feet, but he wasn't steady on them just yet. Faintly he swayed, but no one moved to help him. His voice, however, didn't waver--rather, it sounded like it belonged to someone else, someone hard, determined, and angry. "If it had been you, you'd have called them over and egged them on and hit them with a spell, but it _wasn't_ you, Sirius! And I was a little more concerned with surviving than with figuring out who to blame! You don't even care what _happened_, so long as you can find out who's at fault! You can't look at the _effect_ without thinking about the _cause_!"

Somehow his shaking legs carried him out of the common room, up the stairs, and into the dorm, where he collapsed fully-clothed on his bed and buried his face in the pillow. If he was lucky, perhaps it would smother him, and he wouldn't have to face them all again. At that particular moment, he would rather have amputated his own hand with a hacksaw than looked Sirius Black in the eye. The unfamiliar, unnatural fury that had possessed him had summarily decamped and fled, leaving behind a gaping space that yawned hollow and sinister in the pit of his stomach. Regret churned poisonously at the bottom, hissing and spitting like James's cauldron on a bad day in Potions.

At once fervently and morosely he began to wish, as the desperate tend to do. He wished he hadn't been so weak as to cave in to the swift, superfluous spite that had sought his voice for its own. He wished that he hadn't stepped into the Three Broomsticks this evening, idly daydreaming alternately about a pay raise and an imaginary audience chanting his name. He wished he hadn't taken refuge there at all, wished he hadn't accepted the job offer and embroiled himself in the intricacies of Rosmerta's idiosyncrasies and the lunacy of Saturday afternoon traffic.

He wished he hadn't come to this school, with its tacit rules and its unfathomable hierarchies. He wished he had never been bitten--never screamed, thrashing wildly, listening to the shrill reediness of the sound with something like wonder and something like mortification; never felt the hot blood running from the mangled wound, never stumbled and staggered and crawled back home alive. Something like alive. Preserved only at a terrible cost that no sane man would continue to pay; a toll that would grind his soul to dust one full moon at a time.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Remus didn't know how much later it was that the footsteps labored their way up the stairs. It could have been minutes or hours--or possibly days. He had been breathing into the pillow for a long time. His hope of suffocation was seeming slightly more realistic.

The mattress springs creaked like a door hinge in a horror movie as they bore the weight of a sixteen-year-old boy. The silence endured a few seconds more, and then Sirius spoke.

"You're right," was what he said, and Remus knew that it wasn't an easy thing for Sirius Black to admit. He had forsaken his family's values, but pride was more deeply-ingrained than any motto. "I was wrong to approach it that way. I know I shouldn't give any excuses, but I've got a few ready in any case." Tentatively a hand came down on Remus's shoulder. "We're brothers, Remus, and sometimes I think there's more wolf in me than in you. When I saw the way you were--what had happened to you as a result of it--I had to know what had made you that way. What had been done. And I got preoccupied with figuring that part out, when I should have been thinking about how to fix the current problem, not the one that had already taken place. I got distracted. I got excited about the idea of wreaking bloody revenge on whoever had done that to my brother--so excited that I forgot all about _helping_ my brother, which was the whole point in the first place."

He paused and cleared his throat.

"I'm scared, Remus. I'm scared as hell that something's going to happen--to one of you, to the only real family I've got. Jesus, Remus, I don't think I could take that--take losing one of you. And I'm scared shitless that I'm going to find out very soon whether I can or not. When I saw you come in paler than a sheet and go stammering off an explanation to Rosmerta--tell her how they're out in the middle of town, just smashing things up for the _hell_ of it--the first thing I wanted to know was how to stop it. How to stop them, and how to get them back for it. How to make sure they get what's coming to them. Because no one does that to my brothers. Not on my watch."

The pressure of Sirius's hand lifted. Slowly Remus raised his head and looked at the boy who called him brother, who had folded his hands, his elbows on his knees.

Ruefully, with that careful hint of irony that frequented his face, Sirius smiled. "Can you, Moony," he said, "find it in your capacious heart to forgive me?"

Remus rustled up a watery smile in return. "Perhaps if there's some money involved," he replied. "Bribes are a remarkably good motivator."


	8. Marked

_Author's Note: I finally got Microsoft Word downloaded on my new computer. Things should look a little bit cleaner now accordingly._

_Sweet._

_The first half of this chapter feels forced to me, even after major editing. I hope it doesn't suck as much as I think it does. The second half I wrote awhile ago, which helps. Ha._

_Anyway. As you were._

* * *

**CHAPTER EIGHT**

**Marked**

So much glass. There was so much glass.

It took Remus and Rosmerta two hours to sweep the floor to satisfaction. Without the mediating barrier of the window, it was cold inside the Three Broomsticks—horribly cold. Remus's hands were numb around the broom handle as he made one last trip around the perimeter checking for pieces they'd missed. His eyes lighted on a tiny shard half-embedded in the wall, a forlorn little fragment that glimmered like a full-fledged diamond. Rubbing a bit of feeling back into his fingers, Remus picked it out and dumped it into the bin with all the others.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and the only word he could think of that described what he saw there was "defeated."

"That should do it for now," Rosmerta sighed. For the past half hour, she'd been trying to get an estimate for the cost of replacing the window. There was a man out fixing the window at Zonko's—a man who had tripled his rates the moment he set foot in Hogsmeade and saw how desperately his services were needed—and she hadn't been able to get ahold of anybody else. "I'll try to get this sorted out in the next few days," Rosmerta went on wearily. She'd been in the store since just after Remus had talked to her by Floo. Her hair spread in intricate tangles over her shoulders, thick and dark, unkempt and untamed, and her clothes were wrinkled. She hadn't slept. "I'll send you a note when things are back to normal," she promised.

Remus knew that was his cue to leave—to leave her to the desolate ruin of her life's work, swept clean now but painfully wretched all the same. He leaned the broom against the counter and walked out. The hastily-scrawled sign taped to the door read _Closed for Repairs_.

He had tried to sleep the night before. He'd closed his eyes; he'd counted sheep and other livestock; he'd thought peaceful thoughts about clouds and butterflies and sea breezes. Once he'd even managed to doze off for half an hour, to a dream of smashed windows and hungry green flames licking at his feet.

Utterly unsurprisingly, that half hour hadn't helped much.

The Great Hall was filling up as he trudged in and found his seat next to Peter. James and Sirius were watching him from across the table.

"How does it look?" Sirius asked.

Peter shoveled scrambled eggs onto Remus's plate, and Remus mustered up a smile to thank him.

"Abysmal," he said in answer to Sirius's question. He fumbled for the fork with fingers that still weren't responding very well and poked at the food Peter was still diligently piling onto his plate.

James opened his mouth to say something just as Dumbledore tapped his wand on the podium at the head of the room. The sound was imbued with a magical ability to resonate, and the room quieted obediently.

"In light," Dumbledore remarked, "of recent events in the town of Hogsmeade…"

Throaty chuckles rose from the Slytherin table, but Dumbledore silenced them with the closest thing to a glare that Remus had ever seen him give. That gesture alone scared him more than anything the Slytherins might have done.

"I regret to announce," the headmaster continued, "that we have little choice but to announce that Hogwarts will be operating under a ten o'clock curfew."

Groans and cries of outrage filled the Hall so loudly and vehemently that Remus's ears rang. Calmly, his hands folded, Dumbledore waited for them to fade away before he spoke again.

"I agree that this is a deplorable turn of events," he told them calmly. "But, given the circumstances, I believe that it is necessary. I hope that I can rely on all of you to help me in this effort, and I hope that you can understand why it is so important."

Horror curled in Remus's chest like wire in a flame as he realized just what that curfew meant.

As Dumbledore stepped down from the podium and returned to his seat—fielding questions from the other professors, by the looks of things—Peter peered at Remus.

"What's wrong?" he prompted. "You look like you just ate something funny."

Viciously Sirius stabbed a piece of bacon, which cracked where the tines of his fork hit it and split along the fissure, foiling his attempts to spear it. "That curfew is bullshit, Peter," he explained patiently. The patience was very odd given the way he was victimizing his breakfast. "That's what's wrong."

"And our little monthly star-gazing excursions are going to be a bit more difficult," James commented quietly.

Peter's eyes went wide and round. "Oh," he said. "Oh, you're right."

Remus pushed his plate away, feeling ill.

Restlessly Sirius's fingers drummed on the table. "We've still got the Cloak. It won't be as easy, but it still won't be too hard."

Nodding slowly, James took a tremendous bite of a muffin. Crumbs adorned his face and rained onto the table as he added, mouth brimming, "Yeah, we'll figure it out. I mean, it's not like Dumbledore would expel us for _that_, even if we _did_ get caught. What else are we supposed to do?"

_What else, indeed?_ Remus thought miserably.

People had been filtering out of the Hall as they talked, and, after making a final comment to McGonagall, Dumbledore went to exit as well. Seeing it, Remus leapt up and slipped between the people in the aisles, dodging them narrowly, colliding with a few shoulders when he gauged the distances wrong.

"Professor!" he called as he came close, aiming his voice at a glint of silver that he detected in the midst of the crowd in the hallway. "Professor Dumbledore!"

Beard swinging in a way that would likely have been quite comical in other circumstances, Dumbledore turned. He smiled. "Yes, Remus?"

Trying not to let his light panting obscure his words, Remus began, "The curfew—I—"

"—will be exempt once a month, for a medical contingency," Dumbledore finished for him, smiling a fraction wider. "The remainder of the time, I expect I can depend on you to uphold your duties as a Prefect even more punctiliously than usual."

Remus blinked, closed his mouth, and nodded. "Of course, sir."

Dumbledore clapped him on the shoulder. "Good boy." Then he strode off down the corridor, and Remus was left standing in the middle of the rug, students flowing around him, trying to figure out how he felt.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

At a quarter to ten, Remus, James, and Lily left the Gryffindor common room to make a quick survey of the halls. A few young Ravenclaw girls accepted their warning with emphatic nods and sincere smiles—so emphatic and sincere, in fact, that the trio of Prefects resolved to come back that way, knowing it was virtually guaranteed that the girls would still be there when they did.

"Little idiots," James muttered. Remus had the distinct feeling that it was the censored version of the comment he would have liked to make. The edge of James's tongue tended to be significantly duller when Lily was around.

It was just one floor higher that they happened upon a conspiratorial huddle of five Fourth Year Slytherins. Heads rose, and eyes sought out the intruders and sharpened antagonistically. Remus found himself calculating quickly—they were outnumbered, but they had more experience; he could probably Stun or Disarm two of the Slytherins before they could retaliate; if James and Lily were just as fast, they'd be fine. He found his fingers itching for his wand and almost snatched it out of his pocket before he realized that he didn't yet have a reason to suspect the Slytherins of anything at all. The tension was undeniable—no one would have contested that—but he had to be fair. It was just about all their side had left.

"Curfew's up in just a few minutes," James noted, faking casual down to his posture and the hand he ran lazily through his hair.

One of the two girls opened her mouth, but the boy in front took a moment from glaring at the Gryffindors to glare at her instead, and she shut it again. It was immediately clear that this boy was the ringleader. Remus felt a distant pang of unpleasant regret. The boy had cherub's hair—an endless array of bouncing golden curls—and a child's round, innocent face. At the moment, that face was pulling a scowl that looked very wrong there—a scowl that looked misplaced, misguided, and mistaken.

"What're you doing there, Potter?" the boy asked then, a derisive sneer twisting pink lips Michelangelo might have labored over for days. "Flanked by a Half-Blood and a Mudblood. You can do better than that."

All Remus could think was, _They've got us catalogued already._

James was a few steps ahead of him. In the blink of an eye and the intake of a breath, James's wand was jutting into the boy's throat just under his chin.

"Say it again, you little _bastard_!" James was shouting. "I _dare_ you!"

Gold-fringed eyelids lay low, half-concealing the delicate ice-blue eyes. "Are you going to kill me, Potter?" the boy inquired, sounding vaguely interested. James hesitated, faltering, and the languid smile tugged at the rosy lips again. "James Potter," the boy said, "you don't have the fucking balls."

As one the Slytherins turned and swept down the hall, disappearing around a corner in seconds. Little more than a final flick of black robes betrayed that they'd ever been there at all.

Remus discovered James standing stock-still, his knuckles white where his fingers gripped his wand, bewilderment painted in gaudy colors across his face.

Gently Lily set a hand on his arm.

"Let it go, James," she said softly. "Just let it go."

"How long are we going to keep letting it go?" he asked, a quaver of uncertainty in the words. "How long can we afford to?"

Lily looked to Remus imploringly. He wished he had something to tell her.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It might as well have been an eternity later that they plodded up to Gryffindor Tower. Mutely, James offered Lily a chivalric hand through the portrait hole. Even as she accepted it, Remus glanced out the window nearby. He glimpsed a bit of lawn, and he wondered. Then he saw that Lily and James were waiting for him.

"Go ahead," he told them, the words sliding off of his tongue so easily that it was somewhat frightening. "I'm going to make one last circuit really quick."

It wasn't entirely a lie.

He waited at the bank of windows, just in case. The dew on the grass winked like the carpet of glass had that morning at the Three Broomsticks, and Remus wasn't sure whether to find the resemblance amusing or mortifying. He waited.

Even as the moon progressed in its stately path across the sky and he began to doubt that his caution would be vindicated, he heard footsteps and a high, clear whistling.

"'Dies Irae,'" he called out. "Mozart."

The whistling halted so abruptly that the vacuum of sound after it was oppressive. "Very good," Severus remarked, his voice tight.

Remus turned and looked at him hard. A single glance confirmed what the voice had made him suspect—that Severus was paler even than usual, that there were smudges of circles under his eyes like dark half-moons. There was a haunted quality to his face, his eyes flicked uneasily from one subject to another like a fox's when the animal caught the hunters' scent, and his hands shook faintly.

"You've done it," Remus said quietly. It was a statement of fact without so much as a hint of a question.

Severus's features twisted into a familiar scowl. "What?" he snapped. "Are you _disappointed_? Did you think _better_ of me?"

Remus turned back to the window and set a palm flat against the cold windowpane, as if he could plunge his fingers through it, pluck the white moon from the sky, throw it to the floor, and stamp it out beneath his heel, dimming its mocking light forever. "No," he responded softly.

There was bitterness in Severus's accusing voice now. "But you hoped, didn't you?" He snorted. "Your biggest fault, Remus; always was—_optimism_."

A ghost of a smile crossed Remus's face. "True. Quite true. But you know what they say, don't you?"

"That an optimist thinks that this is the best possible world, and a pessimist fears that it's true?" A humorless laugh peeled off from Severus's lips. "A comforting platitude, isn't it, for people like you?"

Remus watched his finger trace the shape of a five-pointed star on the window. "You'll regret it, Severus. I don't want to sound like a nagging parent, but—"

"You do."

"—But I think that you will wish you hadn't done it. Maybe not now, maybe not soon, but someday. It's permanent, Severus. It isn't going to go away."

"As if I'd want it to go away."

Remus shrugged. "People change. And people change their minds."

"I won't."

Remus watched moonlight dance on the wide lawn. "If you say so."

"I know so. This is what I want—what I've always wanted. I just didn't realize it."

The moonlight, the taunting rays that bathed the world in ethereal silver even as they whispered of blood and misery in a voice only he could hear, disappeared as Remus closed his eyes. He hadn't come to argue, and he wasn't going to do it. Silence settled for a moment.

"What's it like, Remus?" Severus asked in a low voice.

"What is what like?" Remus responded, still taking solace in the oblivion before his eyes.

"What is it like being a monster once a month?"

Remus was looking again before he knew it. No one had ever asked that question. Not Peter, not James, not Sirius. Not his own parents.

"I—" There was a bottleneck in his throat as a hundred insufficient words tried to bubble out at once. He hesitated, took a deep breath, and fumbled to select the right ones. "It's…" Rarely was he so unsettled and unseated. "It's—not—easy, of course." He sounded like a fool. He, Remus Lupin, whose only claim to fame beside James and Sirius was his ability to articulate his ideas. He, Remus Lupin, who talked slowly and thought quickly, like the proverb. "I—I catch myself watching it. All the time. I'll be out somewhere, having a nice night, and then I'll look up and see it, and all the niceness is gone. It—" he realized it as he said it and hated the self-pity that wormed its insidious way into his voice. "It ruins everything." The words boiled and overflowed again. "I mean, I'm always thinking about it—always. In the middle of tests, at work, when I'm just _sitting around_, I always know, and I always remember that in just a few days, I'll completely lose control of everything, of all my facilities—of my mind. I won't know who I am, what I'm doing, won't know _anything_ except that I want to—to _kill_ something, to destroy something, to seek out something small and defenseless and hunt it down and rip it to pieces." He clenched his fists uselessly, trying to stop his hands from shaking. "It's just—wrong. It's wrong. These things shouldn't happen. The world—" He was finding this difficult; his voice was sticking; why was this suddenly so hard? "—shouldn't… have… people like me."

Remus heard something. It took him a moment to realize that it had been Severus sighing.

"The world," he said, "ought to wish it had a few more."

Before Remus could assemble a reply, Severus patted him once on the back, wearily, and then turned, buried his hands in his pockets, and wandered away like a drifting storm cloud.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

There were a few halfhearted questions when Remus returned to the Gryffindor common room, but he ducked most of them.

"See anything unusual?" James wanted to know.

"No," Remus lied.

"Good," James decided.

Somehow, it had been.


	9. Magic

_Author's Note: Ow, my face. Damn wisdom teeth._

_More music I don't own from 1978 (and 1979, too!). I cheat._

_Yeah, this chapter is way, way, way out of character. The tone is entirely different. It took on a life of its own. I'd apologize if I didn't love it._

* * *

**CHAPTER NINE**

**Magic**

Sirius Black was having a shitty day.

It wasn't even that anything really bad had happened—or nothing in particular. Just the usual. He was tired of Peter beating him at chess. He was tired of doing homework. He was tired of Noelle Cook trying to waylay him in the halls. He was tired of Remus dragging his feet around the common room, unable to go to work. (Sirius had never understood why he wanted to work in the first place, but having him sitting around wishing he was there was just frigging _depressing_.) He was tired of the curfew. He was tired of Severus "Lead Asshole" Snape and all his subordinate asshole pals. He was tired of James chewing on his quill trying to write sonnets. (James stoutly denied that he was writing sonnets. Sirius had stolen one of the afflicted parchments and there discovered fourteen lines of mediocre rhyme and a few doodled hearts. Furthermore, "_Accio_ sonnet" was effective, which spoke volumes by itself.) He was tired of just about everything. Plus he had a nagging feeling that something really, really terrible was going to happen, and he hated omens more than just about anything else in the world.

Fucking omens.

Morosely he watched Peter take his queen. Damn that insufferable woman, not defending herself… Why were they all damsels in distress all the time? Why couldn't one of the bitches just take care of herself once in a while?

Sirius was starting to hate women. Not that he was, you know, gay or anything. Just that they were all obnoxious twits, and it drove him insane. Lily Evans was all right. She didn't fuck around. But she was kind of like his sister. James's _main squeeze_ and all that dated shit.

He heard The Cars's unrelenting guitars in his head.

_Here she comes again, when she's dancin' 'neath the starry sky; I think you'll flip_

_Here she comes again, when she's dancin' 'neath the starry sky_

_Here she comes again; I kinda' like the way, I like the way she dips_

_'Cause she's my best friend's girl_

_Well, she's my best friend's girl_

_And she used to be mine…_

Except not.

Damn Peter and his vast array of music for every occasion.

No, Sirius Black did not like Lily Evans. He was adamantly unyielding about that particular fact. And, whatever songs popped into his head when he ruminated about it, he was pretty sure that it was true. Lily was a little too… normal… for him. She and James made sense together. And she was basically the sister he'd never had—all supportive and low-key and stuff. Not the wild, vibrant, too-bright-to-look-at kind of girl he needed.

But God, if Noelle Cook wasn't the worst female on the planet ever to take an interest in him. He half-wanted to take her out once and then dump her in front of a crowd just so she'd leave him the hell alone. Likely she'd buy it, too, if he faked it well enough. But that was hard. And it took effort. And he was so _tired_.

Being downright sexy was just so hard sometimes.

"Sirius," Peter said.

"Yes?" Sirius said.

"It's your turn," Peter reported.

"Oh," Sirius said.

He chewed on his fingernail a little and then sent a pawn to its untimely death. Peter sent a bishop after it, and Sirius took the bishop with his rook, wishing he had his damn queen back. The heartless bitch, going and dying on him like that. How dare she?

"Oh, Hell!" Lily cried. As everyone blinked at her, Sirius included, she jumped up, swiped hopelessly a little at the ink that had splattered all over her nice shirt, and then ran up the stairs to her dorm.

She had a pretty nice ass, Sirius reflected. You know, in a sisterly way.

_Auuuughhhh,_ his brain said.

Sirius sniffed in response. _You can recognize that your sister is good-looking,_ he defended.

_AUUUUGGGHHHHH_, his brain repeated, louder.

When Sirius had finished beating it upside the head—proverbially speaking, given that it was his brain—he saw, to his absolute un-surprise, that James was watching the way Lily had left. He was wearing his Dreamy Smile (a trademarked James Expression from the James In Love Collection), and he was gazing after her like she had been a passing goddess.

"She's very stressed out," James remarked breathlessly.

"Clearly," Sirius replied crisply.

Peter took his rook.

Sirius wanted to scream.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The moon was waxing. Remus itched his chest compulsively. It was late afternoon, the Gryffindor common room was unusually empty, he had a nice, long Herbology essay to write, and there was already a fuzz of stubble on his chin. The stuff grew like mold when the moon was almost full. It was extremely annoying.

So was the utter silence in the common room, come to think of it. Remus liked a little quiet as much as the next guy—probably more—but it was a little eerie, and that distracted him more than a bit of noise would have. Bemusedly he tried to whistle "A Little Less Conversation." Unfortunately, he didn't whistle very well, and it did little but remind him of Severus's magnificent rendition of "Dies Irae." The implications of that particular song had not eluded him.

Remus was trying not to mope. He didn't like moping. It really didn't help. Besides, he hated being a wet blanket. Being any kind of blanket was bad enough, and _wet_ was the worst.

At that moment, the blanket shredders burst through the portrait hole.

"She's winding them down on her clock machine," Sirius, James, and Peter were singing, a good ways off-key. "And she won't give up, 'cause she's seventeen. She's a frozen fire; she's my one desire… And I don't want to hold her down, don't want to break her crown when she says—" Here they paused and danced poorly before they shouted, "Let's go!" There was some more shameless gyrating. A few people had come down from their dorms to look. "I like the nightlife, baby! She says, 'Let's go'!"

Sirius hopped onto the couch, mimed an elaborate guitar solo, and leapt off again at the end to smash his invisible instrument all over the furniture. He narrowly missed stepping on James's glasses, which had fallen off at some point. James, for his part, continued to dance, accompanied by Peter. They vaguely resembled a cross between an amoeba, an octopus, and the recipient of a brutal electric shock.

Remus laughed harder than he had in a long, long time.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

That was the thing, wasn't it? Even as they skirted across the wet lawn towards the Willow, that was what went through Remus's mind. What they had—the cohesion, the completeness, the camaraderie—was it, was the whole point. It was why they worked. They complemented each other. They were the four corners of a square, and without each of those vertices, the structure would collapse.

There was nothing in the world better than being one of those corners. Remus had set a tentative foot on that scarlet train the very first time with misery sinking deep in him, weighted by a leaden certainty that he would be spending his seven years sitting alone in the library getting hit in the back of the head by parchment airplanes. When the First Years had been ushered into the Hall, he had been nothing short of terrified. He had spent the train ride trying to be inconspicuous, and now they were going to single him out, the way they were singling out Alan Bailey. Remus wanted to cry. They would put the Hat on his head, and he would sit there forever, shifting, shuffling, fidgeting, and then they would say, "No, sorry, you're not a wizard after all; our mistake," and send him back out, and he'd have to find his way home all by himself—

Someone had punched him in the shoulder.

"Nervous?" his assailant inquired conversationally.

Remus rubbed his arm, more because it gave him something other than trembling to do than because it really hurt. He didn't say anything, because he didn't trust his voice. His white face probably said it all anyway.

"No need to be," the attacker told him airily. He was a tall boy with long black hair and gray eyes, with "aristocrat" written in every line of his face, his grin wide and almost genuine—but that there was a hint of worry in it, just as there was a whisper of strain in his light eyes.

Remus was utterly intimidated.

"Really," the boy went on. He seemed to be reassuring himself as well. "There's nothing they can do to you without your permission, right?"

"Well—" Remus had begun in a tiny voice.

"Sirius Black!"

"Whoops," the boy said. He fought his way out of the huddling host of eleven-year-olds, stumbled, and then strutted over to the stool. Once perched on it, he jammed the Sorting Hat down on his head, crossed his legs primly at the knee, and arranged his folded hands on them.

Remus was awestruck.

Sirius Black sat on the stool for a long time, squirming a little. After an excruciating pause long enough for Remus to realize he was holding a breath, let it out, take a new one, and loose that one as well, the Hat bellowed, "_Gryffindor_!"

_That's a good one, right?_ Remus had demanded of himself anxiously. He wanted the boy to be happy.

There was dead silence in the Great Hall but for the soft scuffle of Sirius Black's shoes against the floor as he stood up and set the Hat down. Remus saw that the green table—Slytherin, he was pretty sure—was chock full of open mouths and disbelieving stares. So was the red table, which he was pretty sure was the House that had just received Sirius.

It was to the latter group that Sirius turned solemnly. Then he cracked a grin, threw his arms in the air, and screamed, "_Whoohoo!_"

The Gryffindor table erupted in deafening cheers and applause.

By the time they got to Jasmine Levitt, who went to the red table as well, Remus was dying of horrible anticipation. He was going to get rejected from the school. He was going to throw up on the Sorting Hat. He was going to get stuck in Slytherin. He wasn't sure which would be the worst.

"Remus Lupin!"

His legs were going to give out. His stomach was going to twist itself out of existence. His pulse was going to explode out of the pounding veins in his temples.

It was an impossibly long walk to the stool. The tiles of the floor extended onward forever, stretching out as he crossed them so that he'd never reach his destination. Sweat beaded at his hairline as he watched them bewilderedly. That couldn't actually happen, could it?

Of course it could. This was a magic school. And he was a magic _idiot_.

Forcing another quaking foot in front of its predecessor, he happened upon a terrible revelation. The Hat wouldn't want to put two students in Gryffindor in a row. Jasmine Levitt had just gone there, right before him. Surely it would send him somewhere else.

He almost gave up and ran out.

Then he was tripping on one of his shoelaces and narrowly missing slamming his chin down on the stool. Between having the wind knocked out of him and being surrounded by the laughter that issued from all sides at once, his head rang something awful. Cheeks burning, mortified tears pricking at his eyes, he scrambled onto the stool and pulled the Hat down low over his crimson face. At least it was a nice place to hide until they kicked him out.

"Well?" the Hat prompted. Somehow he knew that only he could hear it.

_Gryffindor, please,_ Remus thought desperately. _Please, please, please, please—I know you don't want to, but _please_—_

"Heavens, boy," the Hat responded, sounding a bit surprised. "That bad?"

_And worse,_ Remus thought back frantically, swallowing hard.

"Well, why? Ravenclaw would be wonderful for you. Lots of useless information in this old brain of yours, lots of studiousness—"

_But _Sirius_ is in Gryffindor!_ Remus protested frenetically.

"Odd one, that Black. Even more stubborn than you are. What of it?"

_He's the only person who's said anything to me,_ Remus explained meekly.

"So it's about friendship, is it, then?"

_I—I guess—we only just got introduced, but—_

"Gryffindor-ish enough for me. Let's make it official, shall we?" The Hat made a noise that sounded like clearing the throat it didn't have, and then it roared "_Gryffindor_!" in a voice that Remus knew was audile to everyone in the Hall.

Remus thought he might have heard the Hat say "Good luck" as he took it off and placed it on the stool with hands that shook harder than he would have believed was possible.

Clearly, his legs had learned from the recent fiasco, because they took him to the exuberant Gryffindor table all by themselves. Sirius scooted over to make room for him, pounded him on the back, and shoved a goblet of something cold into his hands.

"Well done, Lupin!" he shouted over the chaos. "Brilliant face plant!" At Remus's dazed expression, he went on, "Drink something—you look like you're going to pass out." Mindlessly Remus obeyed, and the liquid flowing down his throat revitalized him somewhat. "Can I call you Loopy?" Sirius inquired politely.

"Your nose is bleeding!" a pretty girl with red hair squeaked. She had just been Sorted, too, but Remus didn't remember her name. She fished out a clean white handkerchief with an _L_ embroidered on one corner and made him take it. He pressed it to his nose and discovered that she was right.

There wasn't time to say much else, because Peter Pettigrew and James Potter were then Sorted into Gryffindor in rapid succession. Brazenly Sirius pushed an older boy to leave space for the two newcomers on his other side.

"You're bleeding bloody _everywhere_," James Potter informed Remus.

Sirius howled with laughter at the pun. Remus surprised himself by smiling weakly.

Despite the fact that Sirius never called him 'Loopy' again—and, furthermore, called him 'Lupin' only on the rarest of occasions—it was very clear even then that something extraordinary had happened that day. Something… magical.

That seemed fitting.


	10. Mutilated

_Author's Note: So. Sorry about the egregiously massive delay. I wrote a twenty-chapter fic. And then I started college. It sets a girl back a wee bit._

_Aww, I'm just makin' excuses. Let's get to the good stuff._

* * *

**CHAPTER TEN**

**Mutilated**

Sirius was watching Remus closely. He had been harboring a suspicion for a while, and that suspicion was that this whole becoming-a-werewolf business was a lot more painful than Remus let on.

What he'd told Remus before had been true down to the last word. They were his brothers, these dumb, confused, capricious boys, and it would kill him to lose one of them.

He'd already lost one brother, in all the ways that counted.

The sickening medley of indignation, anguish, and deprivation burned all over again as he listened to the words that were still so clear in his head.

"You're _leaving_?"

He'd looked up darkly. He'd known that a tantrum was building and had half-hoped to escape before it broke.

One look was enough. He went back to folding things and setting them in his trunk. It felt more final than using a spell, somehow. He liked that—the finality.

"You can't _leave_," Regulus repeated dogmatically.

Sirius owed it to him to look him in the eyes. Regulus's were like his—cold and gray. There might as well have been electricity crackling between those matched, identical gazes. Wouldn't that have been exciting?

To his mild shame, Sirius broke the eye contact first. "This place is a madhouse, in case you haven't noticed," he said.

"Yeah?" Regulus sounded far from convinced. "And you're the only sane one here, is that it?"

Sirius let his silence answer for him.

Some of the derision had gone from Regulus's voice when he spoke again. There was a soberness to it, and a poorly-feigned indifference. "So where are you going, then?"

"James's house."

"That blood traitor?"

Sirius looked up again, sharply this time, hot blood running through his veins. That was too far—too much. "That _blood traitor_ is my best friend, you little shit," he snapped.

"_No_, Sirius!" Regulus had screamed then—just as much desperately as angrily, it seemed. "_No_, Sirius, he's _not_! _I'm_ your best friend, remember? You said so! You said it a million times! You said—you said it was a damn good thing I was your brother, 'cause it meant your best friend was always just down the hall!"

He had said it. It had been a long time ago—a few spare years that felt like decades—but he had said it. And, once upon a time, it had been true.

Sirius jerked his trunk off of the bed. It plummeted to the floor with a satisfying _crash_. He reflected that he should have put his head under it and made things easy on himself. "Then come with me," he said.

James wouldn't have been happy about that. He wasn't sure that James would be happy about having _him_ show up on his doorstep with some bleeding heart story, let alone doing so with his snarky Slytherin little brother in tow. He knew, however, with a terrible and resigned sort of certainty, that Regulus was going to say precisely what Regulus said next.

"Burn in Hell, you filthy turncoat," Regulus spat.

Sirius's once-best friend then proceeded to make a great show of storming down the stairs and slamming his door shut.

Sirius took a deep breath and released it as a sigh. Regulus had always been a bit on the melodramatic side.

Halfheartedly he muttered some spell or another that lifted his trunk a few feet off the ground and made it trail him like—he managed a watery smirk—an obedient dog. Slowly he made his way down the hall, down the stairs, down another corridor, his trunk hovering eagerly behind him, knocking into his shoulder impatiently when he lagged too much. He ignored it. For all his professed conviction, it was hard—leaving forever. This might well be the last time he ever saw the floorboards, the carpet, the wallpaper. Sixteen years of his life had revolved around this place. That wasn't something you could walk away from easily.

He tried to memorize everything as he went, but it was hopeless. Remus might have managed it. Remus had twice as much brains as he did.

That was how he did it, in the end—he pushed the old family out of his mind and focused on the new one. On the Marauders. On Peter, James, and Remus.

So there he was, out in the street with a bloody trunk floating at his right shoulder.

_You fucking idiot,_ Sirius thought blankly.

Then he put his arm out, wand extended, squeezed his eyes shut, and wished hard for the Knight Bus.

When he opened them again, it was coming to a precarious and ungainly halt before him, tires squealing in protest.

Ignoring the cheerful gambits offered him by the middle-aged conductor, he shoved some money into the man's hand, muttered out the address he wanted, and selected the armchair furthest from the front. He didn't think he was up to conversation just yet.

Folding his arms tightly across his chest, Sirius stared out the back window as the driver gunned the engine. They hadn't even pulled away before he considered getting off.

Just who was he kidding, thinking he could really do this? Wasn't a very funny joke, as far as he was concerned. Just stupid—stupid like him. He should just get the hell off now and march his ass right back in that door and up those stairs, and go sulk in his bedroom until he felt better.

The bus jerked forward, and then it was careening through the streets like a bad dream. Sirius felt vaguely ill, but at least it was too late to go back. Admittedly, he could certainly live without ever seeing his parents again—moreover, the very recollection of the rigid silence at the dinner table the night before made him feel sicker still—but Regulus… He… loved… Regulus.

There, he'd said it. Thought it. Admitted it. Bitter tears climbed his throat, trying to reach his eyes, and he forced them down. He wouldn't cry. It wasn't worth it.

But he had. He had buried his face in one of the Potters' spare pillows and cried, and the cot had creaked softly as his shoulders shook.

Blissfully, James had slept through everything. If there was one thing that would have killed Sirius Black instantly at that moment, it was pity.

There hadn't been any letters. Honestly, he hadn't expected any, but he had still preserved some stupid little shred of hope that Regulus might write. Regulus didn't. He was his parents' son. Pride came first—before truth, before virtue, before love. It was the way it had always been.

Accordingly, Regulus hadn't said a word to him since "turncoat." Sometimes he wanted to grab the little bastard and throttle him until he said something—"Stop," or "Damn you," or "Fuck off," or "_Avada kedavra_." Anything.

But there was nothing.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Padfoot," James said.

Sirius returned to Earth, shook his head, and blinked away the remnants of the atmosphere that clung to his eyelashes. "Huh?" he said.

"Eloquent," James remarked. He looked over. "Moony?" he prompted.

"Hm?" Remus replied, glancing up suddenly from his scrutiny of the grass.

"Did I miss a memo?" James inquired, grinning now. "Was I supposed to be lost in thought, too? Because I could always do that, you know, if you wanted."

Predictably, Sirius rolled his eyes, and Remus smiled. Peter, James knew for just about an absolute fact, would have laughed—except that, at this particular moment, Peter was a rat bouncing along on Remus's shoulder.

The three of them were huddled as best as possible under the Invisibility Cloak—which was to say, not very well at all. Their feet, and probably their shins, and possibly their knees, were painfully visible, but James was banking on the fact that it was dark. The full moon, obviously, had not yet risen.

When they reached the Willow, Remus placed Peter gently on the ground and let him scamper off to hit the trigger. In moments, they were dragging the Cloak along behind them as they made their cramped way through the tunnel. Moments after that, they emerged into the eerie, enigmatic silver wonderland that was the Shack. James trailed his hand along the wall, his fingertips skimming over the deep gouges left by a wolf's claws, the peeling wallpaper, the dust that lay thick and full over every surface, a tangible testament to the silence and isolation. This was a sad place. A cold place.

Faintly James smiled. It was warmer when it was full of a small zoo's worth of animals.

They picked a room at random. As it happened, this particular specimen wasn't quite as frequently used as the others, meaning that the furniture hadn't been maimed and the rug hadn't been mutilated—not much, anyway.

Remus was shaking already, tremor after tremor seizing his slight form, and he looked even thinner and frailer than usual.

James had long been of the opinion that Remus needed to eat more.

Remus sank into an armchair, his arms wrapped tightly around himself, his head bowed, agony written in every line of his innocent face—a face that contorted now, wracked and wretched. He curled up smaller in the chair, little and delicate and harmless.

Temporarily.

For then, of course, it happened. The fur flooded out; the fangs surged free; the muscle mutated before their very eyes. James felt himself cringing. It was never any easier to watch, and he could only begin to imagine how it… felt. He'd had nightmares that had given him an idea—he'd woken up tangled in his blankets and panting heard, scrabbling with one hand on the nightstand for the glasses that would permit him to see that everything was all right.

But for Remus, it would never be all right, would it?

"Now would be good," Sirius remarked.

"True," James acceded. Promptly he said the word.

Nothing happened.

He swallowed hard, watching the roiling figure on the armchair starting to take on a single shape, and said the word again, slowly and distinctly.

Still nothing.

A droplet of frigid sweat beaded at the top of James's spine. Ever so slowly it slid its way down, riding the ridge of every vertebra.

The wolf raised its head. Yellow eyes glowed in the moonlight.

"Sirius…" James said slowly, backing up. Too soon he hit the wall, and his fingers danced over it behind him, as if they expected to find a secret passage there, a miraculous egress of one sort or another.

But of course they wouldn't. There was nothing to be found. He was trapped in a corner, and that was all there was to it.

Something like a whimper escaped his throat, and the wolf's ears flicked towards him. Then the wolf pressed them down and back against his skull. A growl that began deep in a hungry, cavernous stomach rolled out into the air like a tidal wave.

Sirius, a great black dog now, snarled in return, lips drawn back from his shining ivory teeth. The wolf growled again, angrily now, challenged. There was an adversary between him and his prey. Even with the cold sweat sliding down his temple, James understood that much. Animals made sense. It was people that were mad.

Sirius barked once, a short, harsh, abrupt sound, and the wolf took two steps forward. Apparently he wasn't intimidated.

Well, James was.

At that moment, without hesitating, Sirius leapt. And maybe it was motivated by instincts, by the dog's thoughts, by the ingrained canine need for dominance, but James still felt a surge of desperate pride. If that wasn't Gryffindor courage, he didn't know what was.

A furious howl died in the wolf's throat as Sirius barreled into him, but almost instantly he was retaliating, his claws raking across Sirius's muzzle. Crimson teardrops flew. Sirius snarled and aimed a bite at the wolf's neck, but his opponent ducked out of the way and lunged for his leg. Gleaming fangs snapped shut a centimeter short, and Sirius took the opportunity to slam his shoulder into the wolf's again. Undeterred, recovering quickly from a brief stumble, the wolf lurched forward again, teeth bared, claws swiping. They found their mark, and Sirius yelped piteously.

Then the wolf released his grip, his rage escaping in a single ear-rending howl, as a rat buried needle teeth in his back paw.

Sirius barked once at James before racing out the doorway and down the hall. Shaking off the stupefaction, James pelted after him.

Another echoing howl followed him like a specter, and close behind it came the sound of skittering claws on the wooden floorboards.

If Dexter Walton, the Quidditch captain, had seen how fast James was running at that moment, his jaw would have dropped to the floor.

As they tore up the lawn, dew spattering behind their feet, the Willow slammed shut just in time to lock the wolf inside. And perhaps then they were safe, but the two boys—for the black dog had become a boy, a boy whose dark hair streamed behind him—continued to run. They ran into the castle, and they ran up a set of stairs, and another, and another, until they collapsed on the floor and gasped to catch their breath.

James stared dazedly at the ceiling. He couldn't move, he couldn't breathe, and he couldn't think. What was left to him but that ceiling, with its arching beams and its ominous shadows? Nothing, as far as he could tell.

Not that he could tell much of anything.

"Sirius?" a girl's voice asked tentatively. "James?"

The next thing he knew, he was sitting up straight, and his head was spinning wildly to express its disapproval of this sudden action.

"Wh… the curfew," Noelle Cook said slowly.

Dragging in deep, ragged, greedy breaths, Sirius staggered to his feet and leaned heavily on a wall for support. "Listen," he panted. "Listen, Noelle, okay? Here's what you're listening to. I will fuck you backwards, sideways, and upside-down if you don't write us up, all right? All you got to do is _not—say—anything_. Got it?"

James's spine felt like jelly. He wondered if it would tilt backwards and drop him to the floor or telescope in on itself, eliminating his torso.

"You're an idiot, Sirius," he managed to say.

Noelle was looking at Sirius like he had parked his flying saucer in the middle of her flowerbed and emerged from the hatch door wearing a fishbowl helmet. She raised one arm and pointed her index finger at him. Her fingernails were painted a deep red.

"You're bleeding," she announced apprehensively.

Wearily Sirius raised a hand to the broad slashes that arced over the right side of his face, narrowly missing his eye. He drew his fingers away wet and looked at them contemplatively for a moment. Then he sighed.

"Fuck it," he said. "Fuck it _all_."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

When they got back from seeing Pomfrey—who hadn't bought their unforgivably thin "juggling knives" excuse but hadn't been able to weasel anything else out of them—the two of them collapsed onto their beds. Sirius got up again, brushed his teeth, itched at his bandages until James scolded him, and then burrowed under the covers and slept.

James folded his hands on his chest. He'd taken his glasses off, so all nearby objects were little more than fuzzy outlines of their former selves, but astigmatism couldn't completely conceal reality. Remus was still out there. He was still a wolf. And he was still alone. They had abandoned him, the boys who had sworn to accompany him to his hell and anyone else's, because he, James, hadn't been able to change. He didn't know why. He'd done everything right. And now Sirius was sliced up, Peter was scrambling around somewhere as a scruffy rat, and Remus was out there, a wolf, alone.

Tears stung James's eyes, and he bit them back, rolled over, and tried to force himself to go to sleep.


	11. Faint

_Author's Note: Last chapter… was a bit of a fiasco. I really have no excuse for the part with James not being able to change. I wanted a plot device. I wanted a bit of action. I wanted to segue into the next thing I had half-planned. I was using it as a means to an end, and I was thinking about the after, not the before. I should have planned. I should have set up. And I should have had a reason. Everything should have a reason, and that honestly just didn't. I figured no one would care, and the next thing I knew, you did. I underestimated you. You're paying attention. You care. And I shortchanged you all._

_So here's how it went. I moped around online for a long time, and my entirely platonic other half (that is, Eltea) took about an hour or so and basically came up with something decent for me to try to explain away my idiocy. Even though she's on vacation. Therefore, there will be a belated explanation. It's iffy at best. I'm sorry. You deserve better._

_I hope this chapter will make up for it, especially the latter bit. I wrote the body of it awhile ago and did the interim pieces after all the insanity that was Thursday._

* * *

**CHAPTER ELEVEN**

**Faint**

Lily Evans could plainly see that something was very wrong. It screamed in the silence and whispered outward like a vapor from the bandages on Sirius's face. It was painted in the dark circles under Remus's tortured eyes and written with a fine pen in every line of James's solemn face. Even Peter looked like his mother had been convicted of murder.

It wasn't right that those boys would act like that. Whatever their reason was, it was probably stupid, and Lily wasn't going to let them sit there and simmer by themselves. If they were going to be sullen, they should do it together, the way they did everything. There was something undeniably _right_ about it when they were all together. It made you have faith in the world. It made you believe, if only for a moment, that maybe humanity wasn't all that bad, if it could produce a quartet like this one.

And here they were, pouting alone. Lily frowned. She was going to put an end to all this stupid moping, and she was going to do it by forcing young men to act against their most vital, ingrained, inherent instinct.

She was going to make them talk it out.

During the Quidditch game against Ravenclaw that afternoon, it quickly became clear just how unsettled James really was. The Bludgers seemed to sense his bemusement, and he couldn't catch a Quaffle to save his life.

It was a narrow defeat, but that almost made it worse.

As the Ravenclaws erupted into cheers, Lily caught Remus's sleeve. He flinched at her touch, saw who it was, and mustered up a shaky smile.

"Could you and Sirius and Peter meet me up in the common room?" she asked over the noise.

He nodded, and she knew he'd make sure that it happened, because Remus Lupin was that kind of person.

Single-mindedly Lily pushed her way through the pulsing crowd, liberally employing her elbows when necessary, until she emerged onto the field. It was there that Dexter Walton, the broad-shouldered, sandy-haired team captain, was shouting at James and gesticulating wildly.

"We went _over_ this, Potter! We went over it a _thousand_ times! What were you _doing_ out there, daydreaming? This is _bullshit_, James! Whatever the hell it is—I don't even care what—you leave it on the sidelines and pick it up when you're done. You don't bring your emotional baggage onto this field, do you understand me? You don't bring _anything_ onto this goddamn field except for one hundred and ten percent of your dedication and your energy and your effort, you got that?"

James mumbled something noncommittal.

"I _said_, you got—"

"Leave him alone, Dexter," Lily cut in.

The older boy set his hard, dark eyes on her in what was probably an attempt to scare her away, but the only emotion Lily really felt was guilt that she hadn't stepped in sooner. She should have been there to rescue James from this bully the moment the bullying began.

"What do you want, Evans?" Dexter inquired pointedly.

Lily threaded her arm through James's before he could react. "I want to borrow this strapping young man," she replied crisply. "You can beleaguer him with your complaints later."

Dexter started to open his mouth, so Lily dragged James off before he could get any words out of it.

As they trooped up the stairs—or, rather, as Lily tugged him up the stairs—James stared at her arm where it was linked with his.

"You really don't have to…" he began faintly.

"I want to," Lily told him firmly.

In wonderment and incredulity he looked at her, searching her face, whether seeking an explanation or a simple verification, she didn't know. Hoping it would suffice, Lily smiled, and that seemed to be enough.

When they reached the common room, she set James down on the couch next to his cohorts. Sirius was scratching at the bandages again. He stopped when he saw the dirty look Lily was giving him, scowled at her, and folded his arms across his chest.

"All right," she said. "I don't know what the problem is, and you don't have to tell me. I don't even want you to tell me. I want you to tell each other, and I want you to fix it. I want you all to be happy again and go around dancing to the Cars and being stupid. And if you don't…" Lily raised an eyebrow at them imperiously. "I'll be very upset."

"We wouldn't want that," Sirius muttered.

"That's right you wouldn't," Lily responded loftily. "I'd turn you into a cirrus cloud, Sirius Black."

Sirius smirked and nudged James with an elbow. "Like the other day, when—" he stopped short and looked at his friend. Until this moment, there had been a bit of color left in his face. Now it was bone white.

"What?" Remus asked nervously.

Everyone had always told Lily Evans that she was perceptive, and everyone was right. It did not escape her notice that Peter's eyes lit up, and neither did she fail to see the way that James's hand landed on Sirius's arm and tightened around it until the pressure bleached his knuckles.

"Oh," Peter remarked to Remus, waving a hand blithely, "yesterday afternoon, while you were at the library, Sirius decided to turn James into a jackrabbit. Fuzzy ears and all."

"And I changed him back," Lily put in, interested now, watching Peter closely. "So what?"

Peter tossed her a quick, airy smile and a matching shrug before turning to Remus. "Y'know. These types of things tend to last awhile. And they probably, y'know, block other spells of that kind until they've lived out their duration."

Remus looked at Peter. Sirius looked at Remus. Remus looked at James. James looked at Sirius. Remus looked at Sirius, then at James again, then at Peter again.

Lily looked at them all looking at each other and started to feel dizzy.

"What in the world are you lunatics talking about?" she demanded.

"It's all ri-ight," Peter sang idly—and rather poorly. "Well—you're all I've got tonight…"

"You're all I've got tonight," Sirius contributed, similarly off-key. "You're all I've got tonight; I need you—tonight…"

"Said, I need you," James added, smiling tentatively, "tonight."

The grin on Remus's face was small and a little sheepish, but it was undeniably present.

Lily got up and threw her hands in the air. "You guys are so _weird_," she said. They were still singing to themselves and swaying a little bit in rhythm as she made a point of skipping primly up the stairs.

Remus was smiling. Sirius, James, and Peter were singing. Boys were weird and incomprehensible.

All was well. Or close to it.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

There was some sympathy to be had for things like boulders and houses of cards and ice cream cones. They were supremely balanced, and a push would send all their weight tipping to one side. Remus felt as if, at that moment, a breath of wind might have made the difference between heartbreaking misery and impossible ecstasy in his teetering heart. For now, while the air was still and stagnant, he was sitting on the fence, tilting slightly—first one way and then the other. He shepherded a lost Hufflepuff First Year to the entrance to her dorm and strolled a few corridors, his hands in his pockets, his mind wandering even more avidly and actively than his feet. And then, because it drew him like a magnet, he went to the hall with the windows and gazed out at the lawn.

Through the broad windowpane, Remus caught a glimpse of the waning moon between the massing clouds and felt something a little like pride. He'd survived one more. He'd risen above it; he'd found the strength.

The pride deflated and gave way to despair. How many years was he going to go on living? Multiply that by twelve. That was how many more there were ahead of him. He ached at the very thought. Miserably he pressed his forehead to the cold glass, and condensation ran down the bridge of his nose. Maybe he should just kill himself. That would be easier, wouldn't it?

He heard the whistling first, as always. Drawing in a deep breath, he wiped the water from his skin and turned to face Severus Snape.

"'Turkish March,'" he said wearily. "Mozart."

Severus reached a stopping point before nodding… cheerfully.

Remus stared. Surely he was hallucinating.

Severus saw his disbelief and smiled thinly. "You didn't think it was possible for me to have a good day, did you?" he inquired.

"I figured it was possible," Remus replied slowly, returning his focus to the shimmering lawn. "Just not… probable."

There was a sound that might have been a dry laugh. "Quite so," Severus noted. The amusement in the voice made it almost unfamiliar.

Silence fell, because Remus didn't know how to respond to that. He let the quiet rest. It soothed his ears and his mind, if not his heart. He wasn't sure his heart knew how to accept solace anymore.

A few solid minutes passed before either boy spoke. The black clouds churned closer together, jostling for position. And then the rain began, first as a tentative mist, then as a solid wall of water pouring from the sky.

"You can have it, too, Remus," Severus whispered.

As Remus turned, the words "Have what?" died in his throat, their charred corpses blocking his breath. Severus had drawn back his sleeve and was running two fingers ever so lightly over the skin on the inside of his left forearm.

Candlelight glinted sinisterly in Severus's eyes as they lifted slowly to meet Remus's. A small, cold smile lit on Severus's lips like a butterfly.

"No one dares tread on you when you've got this, my friend," he said softly.

_My friend._

"It's the key—the key to everything. To strength, to power, to security—to survival."

_Everything._

"He can give you that, Remus." There was an earnest honesty in Severus's voice. Remus couldn't tear his eyes away from the faint outline of the mark—faint, faint, faint, but there. "He gave it to me, and he can give it to you. All you have to do is ask."

"You're crazy," Remus heard himself breathe.

Severus spread his arms wide. He hadn't drawn his sleeve down over that faint, faint hint of a black design. "Look around you, Remus Lupin," he suggested. "Who's crazy? The man who wants to live, or the man who lets his morals blind him to the danger?"

"You've lost it," Remus went on weakly, feeling vaguely nauseous.

There was a paradoxical combination of warmth and bitter cold in Severus's eyes as the other boy appraised him. "Listen, Remus," he said quietly after a moment. "You've been decent to me, most times. You're a coward, and you're a freak, but you're one of the few people who hasn't actively persecuted me, and for that I'll give you a bit of credit. I'm willing to save you. All you have to do is say the word."

_Coward._

_Freak._

Remus turned on him, blood rising in his cheeks. "_You_ listen," he shot back. "We know something, you and I, and I think we're the only ones in the school who do. You know what that is, Severus? You and I both know that the only reason you've done this is to get back at Lily for choosing James over you."

Darkness fell precipitously over Severus's face. It was only a fraction of a second after Remus's last word had faded that Severus's wand was pointed directly at his forehead. His voice was clearer and colder than polished glass, terribly assured, and utterly remorseless.

"_Sectum­_—"

Someone like Severus had to know that Remus was smarter than that. And faster.

"_Expelliarmus_!"

Severus's wand clattered into a corner, and Remus Lupin turned and ran.

Distorted images and half-formed thoughts swarmed in Remus's addled mind. He didn't know where he was going until he found himself in the middle of the lawn, wholly exposed to the torrential rain.

He spread his arms wide and turned his face up to the sky. Let the rain fall. Let it fall forever. Let it soak him to the skin, to the bone, to the core. Let it seep into his soul and wash it clean.

Thunder growled menacingly from almost directly above him, the echoes resounding in his ears after the original sound had passed. The rain plastered his hair against his face, on his forehead; in icy tendrils it plunged down his back, tracing his spine with curious fingers; he looked up at the roiling clouds through the sailing droplets and saw a darting shadow that looked, for a moment, like a bounding wolf.

_Wash it away,_ he thought, desperately. _Wash it all away._

Frigid water poured over him, pooled in his outstretched hands, splashed in his eyes, ran in rivulets down his chest.

"_What am I supposed to do_?" he screamed at the unresponsive heavens. "_What am I supposed to be_?_ Why did you do this to me_?"

The thunder slammed again, its roar endless and deep, deafening and ubiquitous.

"_You'll have to do better than that_!" Remus shouted. "_Come on. COME ON_!"

Blinding white lightning streaked through the sky, splitting a tree at the edge of the Forest clean in half. Limbs crashed to the wet leaves below.

Remus laughed a miserable, broken laugh infinitely more grating to his ears than the downpour.

The ensuing thunder drowned him out, and almost before it had finished, another knife of lightning rent the air and shattered a tree at his right, its withered leaves bursting eagerly into flame. Acrid smoke burned into his nostrils.

Remus felt new water on his face, warmer than the rain.

The thunder might have flattened him if he hadn't been numb to it entirely.

Lightning seared down again, even closer this time, bursting into a third tree. Branches wider than his leg cracked like toothpicks and tumbled to the grass.

Another acidic, caustic laugh ripped its way free of Remus's throat even as the tears spilled from his eyes faster. "_Is that it_?" he demanded, his voice hoarse and unsteady. "_Is that all you've got for me_?"

Thunder devoured his words, and as it faded, he thought he heard something else through the pounding of the rain and of his heart.

He had only a moment to wonder if he was imagining it before something he didn't see bowled into him and flung him to the ground. Limp wet grass itched against his cheek, and something hot and thick dripped into his mouth. Tasting it, he realized that it was blood and concluded that his nose was bleeding.

"Remus, there's a curfew now, remember?" James shouted over the storm.

"And a fucking _tempest_!" Sirius added in an impatient roar.

"It's freezing out here—"

"You stupid son of a bit—"

"—back inside—"

"—able _idiot_—"

"—if we _ever_ dry off—"

"—ridicul…" Sirius paused, and then Remus felt someone shaking his shoulder—distantly, as if in a dream. "Remus?"

He managed to focus on the grass with stinging, hazy eyes. Slowly he pushed himself up and staggered to his feet. "Yeah?" he said.

The Invisibility Cloak had slipped a bit, revealing two wet heads. Sirius looked kind of dashing, but James just looked like a wet rat. Both of them stared at him, at the viscous current of blood running down his chin, at the hurt and aimless rage in his eyes, at the uncontrollable shivers racking his body, his teeth chattering together as if an old crone was shaking them hard in her hands with her other portentous pebbles and bones. They shared a look, threw the Cloak around his shoulders, and, each taking an arm, dragged him back up to the castle.


	12. Promising

_Author's Note: Effing college. Not only does it sap my time and energy, it kills my creativity. Higher education is for LOSERS._

_A note on nosebleeds: Wikipedia tells us that one should tilt the head_ forward _in order to avoid choking on one's own fluids. When I was seven and jumped into the pool to get a life preserver ring (and subsequently slammed my nose into it), I tilted my head back and… didn't die. Meh. Your call. Just lookin' out for your safety. Because I_ care _about you._

_Sorry for the long note. Just one more thing, I promise: I definitely didn't intend for this chapter to end with what it does. It decided it wanted to be written. Stupid autonomous stories._

* * *

**CHAPTER TWELVE**

**Promising**

Remus squirmed a bit. It was awkward, having Lily Evans holding your head tightly between her two warm hands, refusing to let you move.

"Stay still," she ordered for the umpteenth time.

Resignedly Remus obeyed. He attempted to ignore the not unpleasant pressure she was putting on his temples by focusing on the tissue—or, rather, wad of tissues—that he was pressing to his nose.

"You know what this reminds me of?" Sirius inquired absently.

James was scrubbing at his dripping hair with a towel. He paused to glance over. "What?"

"Sorting."

Remus might have snorted some combination of amusement, agreement, and dry laughter if his nasal passages hadn't been otherwise occupied. Peter arranged another blanket around his shoulders. The pile of them resting there was beginning to become somewhat heavy. Perhaps he could have told Peter so, had he not been busy assiduously tilting his head back in order to avoid incurring Lily's wrath.

James grinned ruefully and took up with the towel again. "We were pretty young and stupid back then, weren't we?"

"Now you're just stupid," Lily remarked airily.

As if he hadn't seen that rejoinder coming from a mile or two away, James laughed appreciatively. Remus suspected that the reaction had little to do with what was said, revolving instead around who had said it.

Peter plopped down on the couch and sighed, probably thinking along the same lines.

Sirius took the opportunity to shake his head vigorously in a manner that was distinctly canine, spraying water in all directions. After blinking away the ensuing vertigo, he looked over his companions. "I vote we all go down to Hogsmeade and get hammered," he announced.

"Brilliant," Lily commented acridly. "What shall we do after that? Rob a bank?"

Calmly, Sirius itched behind his ear. "I was thinking blow up an elementary school," he answered.

Very slowly, Lily raised an eyebrow. "You're sick," she said.

"Thank you," Sirius replied equably. "You're not so bad yourself."

Remus couldn't help the gleeful little smile that alighted on his face. There was nothing in the world quite like good banter.

"Glad to hear it," came Lily's retort. "I wouldn't want to commit cold-blooded murder next to someone who didn't like me."

Sirius shrugged. "It's not too bad. You just poison 'em afterward so they can't testify against you in court."

"Sounds like you've got this all planned out."

"You have to think about these things when you're a criminal mastermind."

As Lily opened her mouth to spout off an eloquent riposte, Remus took advantage of the distraction to slip out of her grasp and start for the stairs.

"I think I'm cured," he declared. "Goodnight, everyone."

"'Night, Remus," came the reply, in perfect unison, in the single breath before the repartee recommenced.

"Mastermind? I daresay you flatter yourself, Sirius Black."

"You seem to dare to say a lot, Lily Evans. Perhaps if you did less talking and more looking, you'd notice just how startlingly intelligent I really am."

"Perhaps if _you_ didn't have that blimp of an ego obscuring your vision—"

Remus closed the door behind him and smiled.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Peter joined him in the dorm not long later, covering a tremendous yawn with one hand. "You all right, Remus?" was what he asked.

From his perch on the bed, swathed in blankets, curled up with his worn copy of _The Fellowship of the Ring_, Remus nodded. "Thanks," he added, because it was something he thought he should say.

Peter sat down on one of the trunks, looked at him keenly, and rubbed his nose. "No," he said. "I mean, are you _really_ all right. Like, are you _happy_?"

Dumbly Remus stared at him for a few seconds. "I—I guess," he decided slowly.

Peter smiled the most innocent of all his smiles. "That's not very convincing," he noted.

Remus looked at the book in his hands. He looked at the three other beds in the room. He looked at the damp cloak draped over a chair to dry. And he looked at Peter Pettigrew, sitting there waiting for an answer. That keenness that most people didn't expect from Peter was in his eyes, but he wasn't going to judge. None of them did. None of them would.

"Yeah," Remus said. "Yeah, I am."

Smiling again, Peter nodded once. Assuming that the interview was over, Remus returned to the words on the page, seeking the place he'd left off.

"Why'd you go running off in the rain?" Peter asked then.

Remus looked up. He could answer truthfully. Severus hadn't exactly done anything to earn his confidences. But somehow telling another person's secrets, even if that person had been ready to kill him, just seemed… wrong.

There was enough wrong in the world as it was, without him contributing to it.

"Just… everything," Remus invented. It sounded lame, even to him, but Peter nodded again and let it rest. Peter was good about stuff like that.

"Never read those," Peter remarked, indicating the book in Remus's hands with another inclination of his head. "Are they any good?"

Remus smiled. "Put it this way," he offered. "I live in a world where spells and magic and all that are real, and I'm reading a fantasy story anyway."

Peter grinned. "Sounds promising," he commented.

_Promising._ That was a nice word. A good word. A comforting word. Remus savored it in his mind as he drifted to sleep that night. There was always a lovely, reassuring, _promising_ portion of time between the moment the pledge was made and the moment it got broken.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The first day of first grade had been the worst day in Remus Lupin's six years of life. On that day, and, in fact, within the first five minutes of the bell ringing, a boy named Ed had made it his sacred mission to ensure that Remus knew exactly what hell would be like if it included sing-along time and cut-and-paste.

Their teacher was one of those young women who was unerringly kind to all children—a virtue, to be certain, but one that was irretrievably linked to a considerable fault. Her innocuous sweetness also made the woman incapable of enforcing discipline.

Kids have a sixth sense for these sorts of things, and Ed's was honed to an edge like that of a battle axe.

He convinced a third of the class to call Remus "Wee Mouse," deliberately dripped paint on Remus's drawing of a tree, ridiculed Remus's haircut, dumped out his book-bag, and stomped on his toe while they were lining up.

And that was all before recess.

By some miracle of God, Remus survived the rest of the day and managed to get home. He endured all the way through the afternoon until dinner before the weight of the school day finally crushed him. It was that completely predictable, completely mundane, completely inevitable question that schoolchildren know so well that tipped the scales.

"How was your day, sweetheart?" his mother asked.

Remus poked at his peas. One slipped from under the tines of his fork and rolled halfway across the plate. He wished he could escape so easily.

"Really bad," he said.

Both his parents paused and looked at him, his father in the middle of raising a forkful of mashed potatoes to his mouth. It was almost comical, seeing them frozen there, staring at him, with eyes and mouths wide—like something out of a cartoon.

Then the tableau shifted, and it wasn't funny anymore.

"What was so bad about it, hon?" his mother prompted worriedly.

The words spilled out in a mad rush, trampling each other in their stampeding search for freedom. "Well, there was this boy called Ed, and he was really mean to me, and he did all this stuff, and he ruined my picture, and he called me names, and everybody laughed, and—"

"Remus, you've got to stand up to people like that," his father said.

Remus stared at him in disbelief, his food forgotten.

John Lupin glanced at his wife. When he found her looking pointedly at her plate, he went on slowly. "It's just that—I know it's hard sometimes, but you can't just let people like that walk all over you. If you convince them that their teasing doesn't hurt you—whether or not it's true—then they tend to give up on teasing you. You can do that; I know you can. And if you want him to leave you alone, you'll have to."

Despite his best efforts to hold them back, Remus felt tears welling in his eyes—tears of hurt, of shame, of abandonment. Where were the apologies and consolations? Where were the declarations of unconditional love? Where were the promises—the promises to fix everything? He came to his parents on the worst day in the history of the world, and they told him to _stand up_ to a boy that hell would have spat back out for fear of getting indigestion? They couldn't! It wasn't _right_! Who were these people, these people who called themselves his parents, to talk to him that way? To find _him_ at fault when he'd been victimized? Where was the justice? Where was the _love_?

Choking on the sob that bubbled up in his throat, Remus shoved his chair back from the table, jumped down, and darted out the back door before his parents could even rise from their seats.

Indiscriminately, battling to breathe, blinded by tears, Remus ran, his feet pounding over wet leaves that gave way like dead bodies, his new sneakers splattered in mud. It was cold and damp in the woods that bordered the yard of the Lupin household, but still he ran. He'd run forever. He'd never come back. Then they'd be sorry they hadn't loved him more.

The light faded, and the rosy gold of twilight gave way to the murky blue-black of full-fledged night. Remus's thin chest heaved, and his muscles screamed, but he didn't stop. He wouldn't stop. He'd never stop.

It was shortly after he'd made this firm decision that one of his bespattered sneakers caught on an arching tree root, yanking his foot out from beneath him and slamming his body to the ground.

The dank air among the trees took the biting chill out of the autumn wind that hounded you elsewhere, but even here, by September enough leaves had toasted to reddish-brown and fallen to coat the ground with a generous carpet. It was upon this carpet that Remus lay, and into it that he sobbed hopelessly. He was tired, and his twisted ankle throbbed, and he couldn't run anymore, and they'd find him by morning and drag him home and not love him and send him back to school with Ed—

Over his weak, desolate, sniffling sobs Remus heard something else. It sounded like breathing—the breathing of something very large and very hungry.

Fear surged through his veins with every beat of his fluttering heart. He lay very still and very quiet, his trembling hands clutching uselessly at the slimy leaves below, and probed the near-darkness with horrified eyes.

For it wasn't quite dark—there was yet the fickle, shivering white light of the broad full moon.

That light faded as the moon slipped behind a black cloud. In the dimness that was left, Remus heard the breathing change, and then a tall black figure materialized from the trees to stand before him.

Merciless eyes glinted yellow as they met his. Lips drew back to reveal pointed teeth set in something like a smile.

"Hello, Remus," Fenrir Greyback said.

The great, round moon burst free from its constraints, and the man started to become something else entirely right before Remus's saucer-sized eyes.

He scrambled to his feet and ran.

This was different than the running he'd done before. Some stationary piece of his whirling mind recognized that as Remus tore pell-mell through the trees, ducking the ghastly silhouetted branches, leaping over ditches and roots when he could see them and tumbling into and over them when he couldn't. When he fell, he dragged himself to his feet and ran again. This was different, because abject terror was a far more powerful motivator than childish resentment.

From behind there came a loud and resonating howl. It wasn't very far away.

Thorns and brambles reached for his arms, his legs, his face, and gained purchase, leaving stinging red gashes to mark their triumph. Remus knew that a few little cuts were the least of his worries.

On and on, through the leaves, around the trees, avoiding the nets of intertwined branches and the bushes with their spiky, scrabbling fingers; once splashing through a creek, suddenly drenched in water almost as bitterly cold as his dread; utterly unaware of where he was, where he had been, where he should go; and always, always, with the sound of the labored panting not too far behind.

Closer it came, ever closer. He ran and stumbled and stumbled and ran, his heart trying to force its way out of his ribcage, his mind reeling, knowing nothing but that he had to run, had to keep running, had to get away, had to get home—

There was a snarl from very nearby, and then an unimaginable weight rammed into him, throwing him to soggy leaves that did little to cushion his fall. The blow knocked the wind from his lungs and the last of the comprehension from his head. His fingers closed uselessly around empty air and then uncoiled. Mud and leaves were in his face, suffocating him; he couldn't breathe; and then—and then there was a horror and a stark incredulity as sharp, thick fangs buried themselves in the flesh of his shoulder.

For a moment he could do nothing. And then Fenrir Greyback shook him, and the motion unearthed from within Remus's defeated body a scream to end all screams. He writhed and bucked and kicked and flailed, and the massive wolf growled low and released him. Remus crawled, scrambled, scuttled, dove, but the teeth found him again, digging deeper yet, disappearing into his side. It was only then that he felt the first wound, only then that he felt the hot blood starting to cake on his cold skin, and he screamed again, louder and longer and more desperately still, and stared at the inhuman cruelty in the yellow eyes.

That was all he remembered.

When he had come back to consciousness, he had heard things first—heard a woman crying, and a man murmuring, and what sounded like a curtain being drawn. Then, slowly, he'd opened his eyes, and when he winced at the bright light that burned them, all the pain hit him at once.

He'd gasped aloud, and then his mother had been at his side, squeezing his hand, stroking his hair, tears chasing each other down her face. The tears scared him—he was awake, he was okay, the nightmare was over; why was she crying…?

When Remus looked to his father to ask why his mother was so sad, his voice failed him. If John Lupin's face was anything to judge by, an entire decade had passed. He tried to smile at his son, but his eyes were wretched and helpless and glimmering with tears.

So many tears; so many tears that day and those that followed; and Remus didn't understand. He tried to, tried to take in the things they told him, tried to understand what it would mean, but he didn't. He couldn't.

When a month had passed, and the glowing full moon rose again, he understood well enough.


	13. Lucky

_Author's Note: I just wanted to say… That I love you guys. I very likely might have given up on this story by now, given that it is wandering around pretending it's not lost, except for the unfailing, unceasing support that you guys have given me. And it really does mean a lot. Swiftlystarlit, sirval, and Eltea, you're the reason there is a Chapter Thirteen here, and the reason there will be a Chapter Fourteen. And after that, who knows…?_

_(becomes the Scarecrow and sings)  
__I could forget all about college  
__And never gain more knowledge  
__Write chapters spic and span  
__I could go on ten years or more  
__And make my typing hands sore  
__If I only had a plan  
__(goes to bow, trips, and falls flat on face)_

_And… I don't actually like this chapter very much. Maybe you will._

* * *

**CHAPTER THIRTEEN**

**Lucky**

Noelle Elizabeth Cook had been accurately Sorted into Ravenclaw. That meant a few things. First, it meant that she was a few rungs higher on the IQ ladder than most of her peers. Second, it meant that she did very well in school. And third, it meant that she was quite aware that Sirius Black really wasn't into her.

But knowing that she didn't have much of a chance with him didn't smother the flame that he lit within the depths of her heart or the nervousness he planted in the pit of her stomach. It didn't erase the images of him printed like woodcuts in her mind—stroking his chin with his quill as a professor lectured; jabbing the air with his fork at the dinner table to punctuate a point he had made; swiping a lock of midnight hair impatiently behind his ear; striding through the halls with his back straight and his shoulders set and his robes billowing behind him…

It was the powerlessness that was the worst. He didn't want her, and there was nothing that she could do to alter that state of affairs. She could brush her hair 'til it shone sleeker than a cat's fur; she could hitch her skirt up past her knees; she could make her face up, make it down, make it perfect; look deep into his lovely gray eyes and nod and slowly smile; and Sirius Black, like the stones of the Colosseum, like the Pyramids at Giza, like the axis of the world, would not be moved. When Sirius Black had decided upon something, he decided for good.

He was like that—intent. Intent, and clever, and funny; smarter than most people realized; kind to people like Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew; collected and composed and courageous. He was everything.

And he was gorgeous.

It just wasn't _fair_ that people like that could exist—and could so summarily reject you. It wasn't _right_.

She'd liked boys before, boys with dazzling grins or breathtaking eyes or seemingly endless thick, luscious hair, but none of them had been like Sirius. Or, rather, Sirius was like all of them at once, and the combination of those things was too much to bear. The other boys had interested her. Sirius enthralled her. When he walked into a room, the room _became_ him—became limited to him. Nothing else existed in his presence. Nothing dared to try. His radiance was unprecedented and unparalleled, and not even Noelle Cook, for whom school had been a lark and O.W.L.s had been a laugh, could persuade herself to tear her eyes away from this wonder of wonders.

He had an incredible power over her, and it scared her sometimes. There was a small comfort to be had in the fact that he didn't want to use it, because he didn't care about her in the slightest.

Well, maybe he would notice if she went and died, but he probably wouldn't be too upset about it, or anything.

She and Lily were walking to a late lunch when James came bounding along the corridor going the other direction. He stopped, pushed his glasses up his nose, and offered them his big, goofy grin.

"Hi, Noelle," he said. The edges of his grin twitched upward and outward a little as he added, "Hi, Lily."

Lily smiled back, shyly it seemed. "Hi, James," she replied.

"Going to lunch?" he asked.

Lily nodded.

"Cool," he commented.

Noelle wondered how long this was going to go on.

"Well, gotta' run," James said then, mercifully. "See you ladies later." And off he went, less than gracefully.

Lily watched the way he'd left, presumably not realizing that she was doing so. Noelle half expected a dainty sigh.

"So you like him now?" she inquired, as if it was necessary.

Lily looked up suddenly and then smiled guiltily. "Um," she said. A vibrant blush seeped through her cheeks. "Yeah," she admitted.

Noelle glanced down the corridor. She thought she could still hear James's galloping footsteps traversing it. "He's liked you forever," she noted.

The blush on Lily's face widened, but so did her smile. "He hasn't," she demurred.

They were standing in the middle of the hall, talking, when there was a meal awaiting them not far away. Noelle didn't have much of an appetite anymore, but it was better than loitering around here, looking like an idiot. Glaring at her feet, she intimidated them into walking again, and Lily followed after, lost in her daydreams.

In the throbbing of her pulse in her ears, Noelle Cook heard a single word, repeated over and over like a benediction:

_Lucky_.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

James was late. He was late to a meeting that he had set up, at a time that he had arranged, in a place that he had selected. His book-bag knocked against his side in rhythm with his panting as he loped along, knowing as he did what bad form it was to be late to your own appointment.

Finally, he burst into the common room. Peter and Sirius looked at him disdainfully.

"We were beginning to think you'd flushed yourself down the toilet," Sirius sniffed.

"We were just speculating which one," Peter contributed.

"My money was the one down the hall," Sirius explained airily, "but Peter insisted that it was someplace flashier, like the one two floors down."

"So which was it?" Peter inquired.

As if he hadn't heard the exchange at all, James sat down primly. It was only then that he discovered Remus sitting nearby on the floor. He had a book out and open on the table, but his gaze was on the black pawn he was rolling between his thumb and his forefinger.

"How are you, Remus?" James asked, pointedly ignoring the others.

Remus looked up at him, and James was hard-pressed to puzzle out whether there was more disapproval or disappointment in his eyes. "You guys really shouldn't do this," he said.

"Moony, my boy," Sirius remarked, "if we don't ruffle Snivellus's greasy feathers every once in a while, he'll get complacent. It's for his own good." It escaped none of them that Sirius had used the nickname—the implication being that the four of them were a single body, and that a limb of that body should not revolt against the wishes of its counterparts.

Remus looked at Sirius, melted annoyance doled into the mixture of emotions present on his face. "Maybe Severus is an easy target," he countered levelly, "but he has powerful friends. If he goes to them, they won't forget the insult. And they'll make good on it."

There was silence for what felt like an excruciatingly long time. Later James reflected that it had probably been about ten seconds, perhaps fifteen at the absolute most, but it _felt_ like it was an eternity that Remus and Sirius looked at each other, calmly, neither moving, neither conceding an inch.

To James's astonishment, Sirius broke the eye contact first.

"Fine," he sighed. "We'll just go bandy words with him, then. No real fun."

Remus set the pawn down on the open page. "Thank you," he said.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Remus was staring morosely at a different book when Lily came down to plan out some Prefect activities for him and James. James, for his part, sat up significantly straighter the moment she entered the room. Remus couldn't help smiling a little at that.

They had a few minutes of peaceful duty-fulfillment before Lily began the strafing of their fragile township.

"Severus was telling me you were saying some unkind things to him," she remarked with a deadly air of false indifference.

Looking only at James's face, one might have concluded that he had been stabbed. Just when it seemed he couldn't bring himself to speak, he blurted out, "Why are you friends with that creep, anyway?"

Copper eyebrows rose slowly, and beneath them Lily's eyes were frosty, though her gaze stayed solidly on the parchment upon which she was writing. "He isn't a creep, James Potter," she replied coolly and quietly, "and we were friends as kids. I wouldn't know anything about the wizarding world if he hadn't showed it to me."

James trained his eyes on his shoe, which was scuffing uselessly against the rug. "Okay," he muttered, likely in lieu of saying nothing at all.

Even though Lily continued to focus on the parchment, her hand stopped moving. "We've… grown apart… a little. Over the years."

"It's hard to bridge the House gap," Remus put in softly.

Two pairs of eyes darted to him abruptly, their owners likely having forgotten that he existed. Helplessly he shrugged.

"It's kind of ingrained, isn't it," he explained, "that we're supposed to hate the Slytherins?"

Lily looked again to her parchment, and James looked again to his feet. Silence reigned.

"I just don't want anyone to get hurt," Lily said eventually. "It seems like—it seems like it's getting worse every day, and I just don't want anyone to get hurt."

Remus's mind flashed to a black mark seared on marble-white skin. _Too late,_ he thought.

"I understand," he replied.

"It's such a stupid world," James mumbled.

"No choice," Lily responded.

James looked at the wall. "Yeah," he agreed.

It was plain enough to Remus that they needed a moment to work things out. He stood. "I'm going to go take a bath," he announced. "Fill me in later, all right?"

At the affirmations, he went upstairs to gather his things, returned to the common room, and then departed from it.

He reached the Prefect bathroom on the fourth floor once again just as Noelle Cook happened to emerge from within. She was toying with a section of her wet hair, twirling it in her fingers, and she started to smile at him absently and then stopped. Her bright blue eyes attended something over his shoulder, and, slowly, Remus turned.

He didn't recognize the face, but he recognized the badge. Silver and green were pretty unequivocal, as those things went.

Without thinking, he stepped in front of Noelle.

"Half-bloods," the broad, bulky boy remarked almost airily as he very melodramatically cracked his knuckles, "who support blood traitors. My favorite kind."

Feeling sweat prickle on his forehead, Remus groped in his pocket for his wand. The Slytherin had already drawn his own by the time Remus's fingertips grazed polished wood.

Remus couldn't remember a time he had extended his wand faster. But then, he couldn't remember much of anything, because his mind was consumed by a rampant, ravenous terror. Not for the first time, he wished that the Disarming spell wasn't five syllables long.

"_Exp_—"

"_Sectumsempra_."

Remus saw that coming from a ways away. "_P-protego_," he stammered, making a wide wave with his free arm. A fragile shield wisped into being in front of him and Noelle, crackling an opalescent blue.

The spell hit the barrier like a freight train, making a sound like a thunderclap. A manic shiver raced up Remus's spine. The last thing he needed was more thunder.

Perhaps that was the second-to-last thing he needed, after his shield flickering from existence like a light-bulb shorting out—for that, of course, was what it did. A burst of invisible force ensued like the shock wave from an explosion, shoving Remus off balance such that he stumbled backwards a step.

Lazily, the Slytherin smiled. He pointed his wand. "_Sectumsempra_," he repeated.

"_Protego_," Remus countered again, more strongly this time. This time, the shield quavered but held.

But the quaver was enough to make Remus take another step back.

Another curse; another shield; another step, and Remus found himself backed up against the wall, Noelle clinging to his arm, the Slytherin three paces away.

Noelle's delicate fingers dug into his bicep. "Do something!" she squeaked.

After fortifying himself with one last deep breath, Remus let the shield fall, brandished his wand, and shouted, "_Reducto_!"

The spell whisked the Slytherin out of the way, sending him tumbling to the rug, and Remus grabbed Noelle's wrist and ran.

He might as well have been running blind. He didn't know where he was going, didn't heed his vision, and couldn't control his feet. He simply ran, and Noelle tripped along behind him, her breathing quick, ragged, and light.

He staggered right into the painting of the Fat Lady, leaning on the wall for support, and, over the portrait's cry of surprise, choked out, "Nostrum."

It was only when he'd moved out of the way, waited for the portrait to swing open, and stepped inside for it to shut after him that he realized that his hand was still in Noelle Cook's.

He jerked his fingers free as if they were on fire. His face, as far as his nerve endings told him, really was.

Fortunately, it appeared that he was the only person who noticed that little detail. Everyone else in the room—that was, Peter, Sirius, James, Lily, and two Third Years huddling over some scrap of parchment—was staring at the escutcheon on Noelle's robes, which was blue and black in this sanctuary of red and gold.

"There was a Slytherin," Noelle gasped out. "Tried to kill us…"

"I think it was just maiming he had in mind," Remus noted.

Everyone stared at him.

It figured that he said something clever at a time like this, when no one would appreciate it. It just figured.

Sirius was on his feet in a moment, storm clouds massing on his brow, lightning sparking in his eyes. "This is Snape's doing, isn't it?" he spat.

James had both hands over his face, but his voice rang out like a bell nonetheless. "If it is, it's because we drove him to it."

Had he seen the way Lily was looking at him, James Potter might have realized that life really was worth living. Or perhaps he simply would have fainted clean away. Lily's eyes could do that to a guy, and when they were as soft and glowing as they were now…

Remus reeled his brain back in from where it had been floating near the ceiling. Sirius had jerked his wand free of his robes, apparently just to give him something to grip so tightly that his hand shook.

"Let's kill him," he seethed. "Let's kill the bastard."

"Sirius!" Lily protested.

"Well, shit, Evans!" he shouted back. "You want them running around assassinating people? I, for one, am not going to put up with that shit! I'd say it's about time to fight fire with fire!"

"And reduce us all to ashes," Lily rejoined, heatedly now. "Bloody brilliant, Sirius Black. Next let's all jump off a cliff."

Sirius was on his feet. "It's damn well better than sitting here _taking_ it like you are!"

"And what are we supposed to do?" Lily cried. "Sink to their level?"

"What are _you_ planning?" Sirius demanded. "You going to wait it out, Lily? You going to sit real nice and quiet and hope they pass over you? Is that it?"

Lily rose to it, figuratively and literally. Standing now, she pointed an accusatory finger at Sirius. "Like _you_ have anything to worry about," she retorted. "All you've got to do is join up with Regulus and your parents again, and they'll take you right in!"

Instantaneously, Sirius's face became a terrible thing to behold, a thing contorted almost beyond recognition with rage. He took one step towards Lily, his fists clenched, his wand forgotten. "How _dare_ you _suggest_—"

"_Stop it_!" James roared. Everything squealed to a halt. "Thank you," James went on, more quietly. "Now. Noelle, Remus and Sirius'll walk you back to your dorm. You guys had better head off before curfew."

Remus pushed the portrait hole open. Darkly, Sirius stomped out of it and started down the hall. Despite his ostensible obedience, the storm was still in his eyes, as vicious and remorseless as ever. Remus knew for a fact that he had seen the conception of something here—something sinister, it seemed. He just didn't know quite what it was.


	14. Figurative

_Author's Note: Excuses time! I know this is your favorite part._

_I feel like the quality of this fic has been steadily degrading, excepting the bits and pieces I wrote in advance and wove in. I think the inspiration is evaporating. There are still things to do, but when I try to do them, the words come out twisted, and it all ends up sounding forced or contrived or both. I'm attributing this downward spiral primarily towards my having started college, which not only makes me very tired but also inundates me with insipid reading to do. Not good for the creativity, exhaustion and boring textbooks._

_Yeah, yeah, yeah; no excuses. Up, up, and away!_

_One of these days, there might even be a climax. Gasp! And don't ask me what the hell is going on in the first section of this chapter, because I have no flippin' idea. At least it doesn't suck like last chapter. Always good, things not sucking._

* * *

**CHAPTER FOURTEEN**

**Figurative**

Tuesday was the worst day of the week, as far as Sirius Black was concerned. It was too early to anticipate Friday, and the warmth of the weekend had largely faded. Tuesdays were to be trudged through, tolerated, survived. There was no enjoyment to be had in them. They were a trial.

A trial with a hell of a lot of homework attached.

Sirius tapped his quill on his slowly-burgeoning Charms essay. Flitwick just had no concept of all the important things Sirius had to do with his life. Sirius wasn't quite sure what those things were, either, but he could probably come up with a few if he thought about it. He could be pretty creative sometimes. He could be _extremely_ creative when that creativity entailed not doing homework.

He drummed out a bit of a rhythm on the parchment with the end of his pen. He knew perfectly well how to _do_ the Charm in question; he didn't see why he should have to write a bloody foot-long essay about it. What was the sense in that? It was like telling a monkey to write an essay about how to peel a banana. Except for the obvious fact that monkeys… couldn't… write essays…

Sirius frowned. That was a miserable excuse for a simile, even for one that was only in his head. He gave himself a figurative rap on the figurative knuckles with a figurative ruler. That done, he went up to the figurative chalkboard and wrote _Professor Flitwick is a frigging sadist_, underlined it twice, and stood back to admire his handiwork.

Maybe this was why he never got any work done.

Oh, well.

Back in his figurative classroom, Sirius added _He will someday be smothered in his sleep by a Charms-challenged student, which will not be me and furthermore will have nothing to do with me; this is not a confession _in parentheses under his previous statement. Then he tossed the figurative chalk over his shoulder without caring to watch where it would land and went out onto the figurative playground. He sat down on the figurative swing and looked around. It was a bit of a dreary place; all grays and industrial silvers. Sirius supposed absently that this was a reflection on his impression of school and education in general, though he couldn't focus on the idea. If you tried to analyze figurative places, they went up in smoke, and Sirius wasn't done bumming around in this one yet.

After working the swing for a little while, he hopped down and wandered over the tanbark to a wooden bench, where he sat and watched three children dressed in gray trying to make a sandcastle. The sand wouldn't hold, and their structure kept collapsing every time they sought to bring it up to a substantial height. Sirius was about to suggest that they add some water to give the sand a better consistency when a girl walked up to him.

And not just any girl.

She had dark hair and dark eyes and expressive, sculpted dark eyebrows. She also had a very nice ass—significantly nicer than Lily Evans's, thanks very much. (Take that, James.)

"Hello, Sirius," she said.

"Good afternoon," he replied. He glanced up at the unclear, unresponsive, entirely ambiguous sky, which was uniformly an inconclusive shade of gray. "Or is it morning?"

The girl shrugged. She was wearing black, which highlighted the best parts of her and made her stand out like a slash of oblivion against the watery background.

She drew a ruler and slapped the back of his hand sharply.

"Jesus!" Sirius cried, jerking his hand away to nurse it. "What the hell was that for?"

The girl shrugged. "Bad simile," she remarked.

"It wasn't _that_ bad," he contended. "A little weak, yeah, but not like the last one."

The girl raised her shoulders again, and Sirius decided that he very much liked that little gesture. It played pleasantly with the curves and contours of her body.

"You have a dirty mind," she reported. Before he could protest—all of his prospective protests being lies anyway, of course—she stepped around behind the bench and began to run her fingers through his hair.

Oh, that was nice. She had deft, slender fingers, and her smooth nails grazed his scalp. He wanted to lean back and paw the air with his foot and let his tongue loll out of his mouth.

Looking down at himself, he discovered that he had become a dog. But not the usual dog—now he was a little black Labrador puppy. He was small, fluffy, and painfully adorable.

The girl clipped a leash onto the collar around his neck, lifted him down from the bench, and started pulling him towards the edge of the schoolyard. Sirius tried to scramble away.

"Where are we going?" he inquired warily.

"To the pound," the girl answered.

"Hell, no!" Sirius shouted. He barked a few times and added a growl for good measure.

He was still insufferably cute. It was hard to be scary and a puppy at the same time.

"That's where all the bad dogs go," the girl told him equably.

"What about the ones that stay with their neglectful owners until they mangle some innocent person walking down the street?" Sirius shot back.

"Psh," the girl said.

"'Psh'?" Sirius repeated. "That's not even a word!"

"It's an interjection," the girl responded.

"Interjections are like fake words," Sirius declared, pulling back on the leash, digging his charming little puppy claws into the tanbark. "They're like half-assed words."

The girl tugged harder, endangering Sirius's charming little puppy windpipe. "They are not," she said.

He growled and hauled back. "Are—so—"

"Sirius?" Remus prompted, shaking his shoulder gently.

Sirius blinked, raised his head from his folded arms, and glanced around blearily. From the looks of things, he'd fallen asleep in the common room over his essay. That was what came from sitting in front of the fireplace trying to write about Charms. It was like giving a man warm milk and tucking him into bed, doing homework before the fire was.

Sirius was about to give himself another figurative rap on the knuckles when he remembered how _that_ had gone.

"Hey, Remus?" he said.

"Yes?"

"Never let me have butterbeer before bed again."

"All right."

"_Ever_."

"I understand."

"Remus, my dear boy, I very much doubt that you do."

"Okay… Then I don't understand."

"Very good," Sirius concluded.

There was a pause.

"What?" Remus said.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"So I told her yes, I _would_ go out with her if there was a total solar eclipse," Sirius related, "and I was wondering if you knew when that was likely to happen. 'Not in our conceivable lifetime' being a good answer."

Remus smiled a thin, mischievous little smile. "Isn't Noelle taking Advanced Astronomy?" he asked innocently.

Sirius stared at him in horror. "Wh—wh—"

They were walking back to the common room, and James had to stop and lean against a marble statue of a stately wizard to laugh.

Remus flashed a contented grin, and Peter chortled happily. "Girls are devious creatures, Mister Black," he noted. "You of all people should know that."

"I make a distinct point _not_ to go out with devious girls," Sirius informed him. "Because the next thing you know, they're pulling shit like this." He snorted. "_Smart_ women. Probably the most terrifying thing on this Earth, after the rat's nest on James Potter's head. No offense to rats, Peter."

Peter nodded graciously.

"Oh!" James cried suddenly. "Smart girls! That reminds me!"

"_Here_ we go," Sirius sighed.

"Lily wanted us to meet her up there at twelve-thirty, remember, Remus?" James was yanking on his victim's sleeve. When Remus's face moved into an expression of bewildered recollection, James pressed on. "For the curfew stuff! And it's almost one! Come on, come on, come _on_!"

Remus attempted to fend for the safety of his sleeve, which was still trapped securely in James's iron pincer grip, as the taller boy dragged him down the hall at a run.

"Lily," Sirius muttered vindictively. "Always _Lily_. Lily this; Lily that; Lily's so _pretty_, I'm going to _kiss_ her someday if I ever stop being a prude and a pansy."

Peter smiled faintly and raised his eyebrows. "_You_ could probably have her, if you want her."

"I don't," Sirius answered, truthfully as far as he could tell, "and I couldn't. She thinks I'm an obnoxious, arrogant, egotistical prick, and if she wasn't right, I might correct her. In any case, she and James would be disgustingly cute together and so on."

"That's noble of you," Peter commented.

Sirius frowned. "Probably comes with the nobleman territory. I'd ditch it if I could."

"I don't know," Peter said. "It's kind of admirable."

Sirius stared at him. This was uncharted territory—some quality of his being admirable, that was. Sirius Black was wild, half (or perhaps three-quarters) mad, brilliant, unhinged, and extremely rowdy. He was not, as far as he knew, admirable in the slightest.

Accordingly, he was now also speechless.

Peter rooted through his bag. "Damn!" he said. "I must've left my Transfiguration book in the classroom. I'll meet you back at the common room, right?"

"Right," Sirius confirmed. It wasn't like he had anywhere _else_ to go, except perhaps a figurative playground—and he wasn't sure his brain was prepared to endure another dose of that particular ilk of lunacy just yet.

As Peter ran off, Sirius placed his hands in his pockets and kicked at the rug as he strolled down its length. He'd teach that damn rug who was boss. He'd put it in its _place_.

"Psst," someone said.

Sirius looked up abruptly. His hand strayed towards his wand, slowly, like a Western sharpshooter's just before the stroke of noon.

That one wasn't _too_ bad.

The door to a side room was ajar, and it creaked as it opened further, admitting one Regulus A. Black into the hallway.

Every muscle in Sirius's back instantly went taut. He wasn't sure whether he wanted to laugh derisively, sob like a baby, or throw himself off a bridge. (Where he would find a suitable bridge was a different problem, one that he was not interested in addressing.) For the second time in two minutes—and perhaps in his life—he was struck dumb.

Regulus looked at him sullenly. Ever the rebellious little brother. Ever the unconscionable little imp. Ever the stupid little boy Sirius Black had loved with all his heart.

Sirius forced some saliva to collect in his mouth by thinking about rare steaks and then swallowed with difficulty. "What do you want?" he asked, forcing his voice to sound cold.

As always, Regulus did his damnedest to match his brother's frostiness, flake of ice for flake of ice. "You shouldn't associate with those people," he announced.

Sirius felt a growl building in his chest and fought it down. Now was not the time to rip his brother's throat out. That could wait. "And why not?" he inquired.

Regulus made an altogether risible show of looking both ways. "Because some shit's going to go down," he explained in a low voice.

"_Hey_." Sirius scowled. "Don't you talk like that."

The scowl that alighted on Regulus's face probably matched perfectly. It was a good thing they had those opposite badges to tell them apart.

_Not_.

"Why not?" Regulus retorted. "You say shit like that all the time."

Sirius leapt forward and punched him in the arm. "Well, I'm not _you_, you little shit!"

Regulus swung and missed. "_You're_ a little shit!"

"Your _mother_ is a little shit!" The words had slipped free from Sirius's mouth before he could bite them back. It was what they'd always said—a bit of nonsense to slaughter their pointless little stereotypical sibling arguments. How they would laugh, and laugh, and laugh…

"Your _face_ is a little shit!" Regulus said.

Sirius stared at his brother incredulously, which gave Regulus the opportunity to pummel at him ineffectually with both fists. For a good few minutes, they beat at each other, neither really intending to hurt the other, neither hoping to land a solid blow, neither really wanting to stop. Then Regulus hit Sirius where he already had a bruise from running into a doorframe, and Sirius shoved him hard enough that he fell on his ass on the floor.

Frowning up at him, Regulus rubbed at his shoulder. Sirius didn't think it a coincidence that his most recent strike had been aimed there. "You never talk to me," Regulus said.

"_You_ never talk to _me_," Sirius countered, folding his arms across his chest.

"Yeah, fuck you."

"Don't fuckin' say that."

"You just fuckin' said it."

"Look, do I have to—?" Sirius raised a fist and left the question pointedly open-ended.

Regulus snorted and collected himself to his feet. Unnecessarily he brushed off his robes. His green and silver badge glinted in the candlelight, and Sirius felt his heart break one more time. How hopelessly absurd was it that a fucking _hat_ had split them apart?

He knew, however, that that wasn't all there was to it. The Sorting Hat had played its cruel role with gusto, yes, but that had only been a small fracture in the once-smooth surface of the Black brothers' rapport. It had been Sirius himself who had dug the chasm that gaped between them now—dug it with his own two hands, bit by bit, filth under his fingernails. At the core, this was his doing.

"Just be careful, is all," Regulus told him.

Sirius looked at his brother—his baby brother, his pupil, his apprentice, his confidant and his companion. That face was so similar to his; so close to the visage that appeared in the mirror. The eyes, the cheekbones—Regulus styled his hair differently, and deliberately so, but the color and the texture were the same. The Black brothers could have gone down in history. They could have been inseparable; they could have been unstoppable.

"You be careful, too," Sirius said, hollowly.

"Fuckin' whatever."

"And knock that shit off or I'll knock it out of you."

"Kiss my ass, Sirius."

"I'll kick it halfway to Australia for you, but that's about the extent of my services."

Regulus gave him the finger.

Sirius shoved him. "Get the hell out of here, you little cretin."

In the middle of his third step, Regulus hesitated and turned. "For real, though," he said slowly. "For real, be careful."

Once again Sirius crossed his arms. "Why?" he demanded.

Regulus's eyes shifted incessantly, refusing to focus on a single object for more than a portion of a second. "Because you hang out with half-bloods," he answered eventually. "And half-bloods are in deep shit."

All the wispy fragments of love and wonder and confusion and happiness coalesced into one dark cloud of fury.

"If you bastards fucking _touch_ them—"

Though he was no great interpreter, Regulus Black saw the signs on his brother's face. Of course, those signs might as well have been written in neon. Regulus ran.

"_Get_ back here—"

Sirius was shouting at an empty corridor. He clenched his fists, then released; clenched and released; breathed slowly in and out. It was like reining in rearing horses, but he did it.

Now, _that_ was a bad simile. One step after another, Sirius went back to the common room. He was halfway to the figurative swings by the time he arrived.


	15. Rich

_Author's Note: F my homework. F it to H. (The "F" means "forget." I swear.)_

_I found a typo back in Chapter Seven. Horrible. Horrible._

_This chapter ended up being longer than I intended. I was inspired. Right in time to have to go to class. (See previous rants on college.) Snape decided he was done getting neglected. Very done. So this chapter's huge. I'd apologize, but you probably like it that way._

_This chapter propels us past 40,000 words. Upward and onward!_

* * *

**CHAPTER FIFTEEN**

**Rich**

Remus and Lily were consulting her latest list. James was mostly consulting Lily—that was, memorizing every detail of her face—but had mastered the art of nodding and agreeing at the right times, so he made it look pretty convincing.

That was an unfair assessment, and Remus relented. James actually did care about all this Prefect stuff, and he earned his badge. Remus had been surprised how solemnly James had taken up the mantle, and it wasn't just a passing interest. He was really, honestly intent on helping to improve the school.

Remus looked up when the portrait swung open. Sirius stepped in through it, and there was something slightly… _off_ about him.

"How are you?" Remus asked, trying to sound cheerful and conversational instead of concerned. He always worried that he seemed too anxious—which, of course, made him _more_ anxious, but that was a different problem entirely.

"Eh," Sirius answered noncommittally. He tossed himself down on the couch next to Peter.

There was something in that "Eh" that prevented Remus from digging for details—some subtle note of strain. The last thing Remus wanted to do was push Sirius Black over the edge. It seemed like it would be all too easy.

Speaking of Sirius, he was looking down at his tie as if it was an abomination. Slowly, he removed it, and then he draped it over the edge of the couch and turned his gaze away. Remus was mystified.

He glanced again at James, who was pointing out to Lily something written on the parchment. James Potter had a good shot at Head Boy, Remus realized—a damn good shot, really. Everyone who boasted half a brain knew that Lily had been selected for Head Girl the day she set one authorized, even-tempered, dutiful foot on Hogwarts soil, but now it looked to Remus like James could very likely become her counterpart.

Faintly Remus smiled to himself. That was fitting, wasn't it? That James's gradual transformation from a spoiled, self-centered little boy to a balanced, self-assured young man would be commended in this way? It was an accolade he deserved, and one that he could share with Lily, drawing them even closer together. It was perfect, wasn't it?

They would never want a werewolf as a Head Boy anyway. Whatever his qualifications. Whatever his hopes.

Silently Remus watched the corner of the parchment crinkle as James reached over to correct something, and, considering the slight marring of the fragile paper as if it was the gravest matter in the world, he was reminded with a sudden jolt of the letter he'd received at breakfast. An unremarkable owl had deposited the twice-folded scrap of parchment into his lap just as the Marauder quartet had been maneuvering free of the table to run for class, and he had tucked it into his back pocket and forgotten its existence entirely.

Until now, that was.

The insatiable itch of curiosity coursing through him, Remus fought the note out, flattened the worst of the wrinkles with the heels of his hands, and opened it. A few terse lines of dense handwriting greeted him.

_Remus—  
__3B's back in business. Got a window, at least. Rest should follow. Come at 7 on Weds.  
__Rosmerta_

Remus looked at his watch. Six forty-five.

"Dang it," he said.

"Just say it, Remus," Sirius remarked from where he was stretched out on the couch, his eyes closed, ostensibly sound asleep. "Just say 'Fucking shit and hellfire.' It'll make you feel better. I guarantee it."

"Thanks for the suggestion," Remus replied dryly. He took to his feet, straightened his clothes a little, and glanced at James and Lily, who were looking up at him. "Work," he explained apologetically.

"What about the curfew?" James asked slowly.

He would make such a good Head Boy.

"Well, I _am_ a Prefect," Remus noted. "If I'm a few minutes late, I don't think anyone'll really mind."

James shrugged and smiled. "All right. Have fun, and all that."

Remus smiled. "I'll do my best."

He made it to Hogsmeade by ten after seven, and, sure enough, there was a brand new pane of glass in the window at the Three Broomsticks. A bell jingled cheerily as he stepped through the door into the warm yellow light of the restaurant proper. Rosmerta was tending to a few lingering customers, and she thanked them and approached him as he entered.

"There's a lot of unpacking to do," she announced, wiping her hands on her apron.

Remus nodded obligingly.

"No," Rosmerta said. "I mean a _lot_."

By eleven, Remus had conceded that Rosmerta had been right. In fact, he had conceded that particular point many, many times, often under his breath in a vindictive mumble.

It was on the way back that the trouble started. Or, perhaps, that the trouble continued.

It started as an innocuous prickle at the back of his neck, another flicker of harmless paranoia. He pulled his coat tighter around him and walked a bit faster, consciously deciding to ignore it. He worried too much—that was what it was. He just worried too darn much, and he needed to grow up and learn to take things in stride.

_Just think about something else,_ he told himself sternly. Obediently, his mind cast around for a subject and landed on the Defense Against the Dark Arts essay due on Friday. Yes. That was something to think about. He kind of liked DADA. There was something calming about it, something reassuring about being equipped with spells to fight against the wrong in the world. It was about studying the dark in order to better prepare the light to meet it head on—meet it and win. It made him feel stronger, more secure. Like everything wasn't hopeless after all.

But there was a catch. The chill in the wind whispered of it, grazing Remus's ears, numbing his nose, urging his teeth to chatter. They wouldn't need the defense if the dark wasn't so strong. They wouldn't need to write an expository essay if a man whose name you didn't speak wasn't out there making headlines, drawing buzzing, bewildered journalists to the blood he spilled with abandon—with childlike glee.

He wondered what Severus would write for his essay.

"_Well, Professor, I _would_ write you a clear, concise, and very competent treatise on the topic assigned, but, you see, I have this mark on my arm, and I really think it's pointless for me to pretend that I want to learn how to _counter_ the kinds of things I'm going to do to people."_

_Christ,_ Remus thought. He didn't usually think words like that. But the idea of Severus performing Unforgivables on unsuspecting innocents made him feel physically ill. Whatever he said, whatever he claimed, whatever he wanted to believe, Severus was better than that. Or he could be, if he wanted.

There was a rustling in the bushes.

_Squirrel,_ Remus thought firmly. _Rabbit. Stray cat. Serial killer armed with kitchen cleaver and semi-automatic pistol._

He hesitated. He had two choices.

_Fight or flight, Remus Lupin?_ his brain inquired almost bemusedly.

He picked the latter.

As he leaned against the wall of the castle, panting hard, looking up at the cold stars in the sky, he realized just how much he hated the way that he always ran. He ran from everything—from confrontation, from strife, from truths he didn't want to face and from the slightest hint of danger. It probably _had_ been a squirrel that had sent him scuttling off homeward with his tail between his legs. What did he have to fear? He could have hexed that squirrel off the map. He could have hexed the _serial killer_ off the map.

_Maybe,_ he thought, _next time will be different._

He paused.

"Liar," he muttered aloud. Then he slipped into the castle and started the trek up to the dorm.

He was only halfway there when McGonagall intercepted him.

"Mister Lupin?" she said, almost uncertainly.

"I—" he started.

"It's after curfew," she went on, as if he didn't know, looking at him as if there was some mistake.

"Yes, but—"

"You're a _Prefect_."

"_Yes_, but—"

"Of all people, you should be observing that curfew meticulously."

"I _know_, but—"

"I'll have to take House Points."

"I was _working_!" Remus burst out, louder than he intended. He snapped his mouth shut as if he could eat the words, but they were gone by now, fading into the empty air. Meekly, he added, "In Hogsmeade," as if that would fix everything.

McGonagall pressed her lips together. "Mister Lupin," she began.

It would have been polite to wait and let her to finish, but decorum was far too dangerous now. "_Please_," Remus cut in desperately. "I can't _afford_ to come here if I don't work on the side, and I have to take any hours I can get around classes."

Steadily, if somewhat perplexedly, she looked at him. McGonagall was not easily perturbed, but he'd sent a wave rippling over the surface of her composure. She knew him, she knew his reputation, and she knew he was telling the truth.

Almost offhandedly Remus wondered if she'd pull out the cliché as a last resort. In the next breath, she did.

"If I allow you to break the rule," she reasoned slowly, "I will have to allow everyone to break it—won't I, Mister Lupin?"

"No," he insisted, hating the word's juvenile ring of disagreement for disagreement's sake. "I don't think there's anyone else in these exact circumstances—and if there is, then that person needs the exemption just as much as I do." As terrifying as it always was, he looked up at her and met her eyes. "_Please_, Professor," he repeated. "I just… don't have a choice…."

Her hesitation lasted for a long series of moments jammed up against one another like derailed freight cars in a train wreck. At last she cleared her throat and folded her hands before her, the arch of her eyebrow alone speaking volumes.

"Remus," she said. "Don't let me catch you again. Is that understood?"

"Perfectly," he replied, breathless with gratitude.

She nodded his dismissal, and he tore off down the corridor towards the safety of the dorm.

He was going to punch the next person who said McGonagall was mean.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"You don't have to walk me to the bathroom, James," Lily told him.

He shrugged. "A lot could happen," he noted.

"It's twenty steps away from the door." No one else did wry amusement so well. No one.

"Twenty-five, at least," he scoffed.

"Nineteen, twenty, twenty-_one_." They'd arrived. "Closer to twenty," Lily pointed out, smiling a little.

James shrugged. "Twenty-one steps is a pretty arduous journey," he declared.

The smile that continued to toy with Lily's lips was an exquisite one. Not that they weren't all exquisite.

"You really don't have to take care of me," she said again.

James stopped resisting the black hole draw of her verdant eyes. "I want to," he responded.

Being brilliant—being _Lily_—she remembered the origin of the words, remembered that she had spoken them first, with her arm looped through his and the revitalizing scent of her hair wreathing him sublimely. Those words were a promise, a vow, a guarantee, as well as an explanation. They were a pledge, and James Potter knew for a fact that he would rather drown in sewage after being shaved bald and paraded through the Arctic than break that pledge.

Between the delicate illumination of the dancing candles and the gentle blush that claimed her cheeks, Lily looked like nothing less than a goddess. She should have been on display in some grand art gallery in France, pausing in thought, a red rose cradled in her hand, with that low light reaching out its luminous fingers to lay flame in the golden highlights of her hair; to carve wells in the expanses of her eyes; to brush her skin with feathery shadows and raise her from the level of an object inspiring joy to one inducing awe. Lily was always very pretty. At this moment, as James stood still and silent, not daring to breathe, she was absolutely beautiful.

It made him wish he had a photographic memory.

And then all wishing was superfluous, because everything disappeared as Lily Evans pushed herself up on her toes and kissed him.

In the swirling confusion of exaltation and disbelief, despite the paradox of feeling as if he was floating to the rafters and melting into a puddle at once, James recognized that _she_ had most certainly kissed _him_. He would never have scrounged up the courage to sully something so entirely pure, to bring his corrupted shape into the proximity of her perfection. No, this was Lily's doing. And if that was the case, it had to be a wonderful thing. Lily was only capable of wonderful things.

Not reluctantly, James gave in completely, and in his head angel choruses sang and sunlight chased dark clouds to the edges of a bright horizon. It was probably for that reason that he didn't notice the choking sound of horrified incredulity that came from a shifting shadow not far away.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Severus hadn't cared about curfew. He couldn't work up much fervor over House Points in the first place—Slytherin would bully its way to the top with Quidditch anyway, if worse came to worst—and he doubted that anyone would bother to indict him for breaking the rules. It was expected of Slytherins. Why not fulfill one more prophecy of prejudice?

He had thought—stupidly; _stupidly_—that he needed to hear her voice. And perhaps it had been soothing, for a moment, marred as it was by the rejoinders emanating from the tumor at her side. He had hoped only for a parting salutation as she stepped out, perhaps; or a laugh loud enough to be audible from his side of the wall that separated them. He had thought that a murmur or two would be his reward, and that a murmur or two would be more than enough. Or perhaps he hadn't thought at all, and had simply acted on one of those wretched impulses that possessed him like malevolent spirits.

His mother told him every year before he left—"Think twice, Severus. Or three times." Why hadn't he listened? Wasn't this newfound hell little more than his comeuppance for disregarding the wisdom?

Fool. Utter, unconscionable fool.

The mere abstract contemplation of a horror like the one he'd seen—for of course he had considered the odious possibility—had set nausea to roiling in his stomach. The physical _sight_ of it—clear, true, and incontrovertible—was something else entirely.

He tried to force it into perspective by thinking about starving children in Africa. This part was rehearsed: _he had and had access to countless luxuries the likes of which his distant counterparts barely had the strength to dream_. Beyond the ludicrousness of it was a bit of shame that might be transmuted into comfort. It was his reflex, and sometimes it worked, to a degree. Today, picturing the pleading eyes and distended bellies just made it worse. Today, it just made him seem like a glutton and an ingrate on top of being a miserable, misled, misbegotten fool.

The flush that ascended his face might have been spurred by rage and might have been born of hopeless love. Weren't they the same thing, really? At the least, two sides of a coin.

Mankind should have melted that coin down for scrap eons ago. Both faces were useless.

Oh, this was rich. This was _delectable_. Hadn't he known this was going to happen? Hadn't he predicted and prepared for this contingency? Hadn't he resignedly accepted that his advice wasn't going to take hold and played this scene in his head to soften the edges when reality came?

Oh, this was _rich_. He was jealous of James—James _Potter_, the lowest of the low. Envying scum—what exactly did that make him? Sub-scum? Filth?

Why couldn't the world leave him one damn thing? Was that really too much to ask?

When eventually the worst of the horrors ended, Lily bit her lip, blushing hard, and slipped into the bathroom without a word. James Potter stood staring for a moment, an idiotic, dreamy smile blazoned on his features, before wandering back towards the Gryffindor common room. After he disappeared through the portrait hole, Severus slid to the floor. He didn't even care that James had just brazenly announced the password. Any Slytherin worth his salt would linger here until all motion ceased and then proceed to wreak havoc in the enemy dormitory, but Severus didn't think he had the energy to stand, let alone wreak any havoc.

He hadn't moved by the time Lily emerged from the bathroom, her sopping hair draped over her shoulders, smiling to herself—that sweet half-smile that whispered of dozens of little secrets dammed behind her lips. Severus wanted to hear them. He would have listened to them all. He would have listened to her talk about James, just to have something to listen to. Just to be acknowledged. Just to know that she needed him a fraction as much as he needed her.

With his eyes he followed each of her twenty-one even steps back to the portrait at the door. She belonged only to his eyes now. And only in secret. In hiding. In the shadows. The more he hacked feebly at the hydra heads of his shame, the greater the beast became. Had he done this to himself, or had she done it to him?

"Severus?" came the tentative prompt.

"_Sev?"_

"_Yeah?"_

"_Um…"_

"_What?"_

"_Well, just—just that my mum—she… doesn't like you."_

How much courage it had taken. _"Well… well, do _you_ like me?"_

"_Of course I do! Tons and tons!"_

And how richly his fortitude was rewarded. His joy redoubled, feeding upon itself. _"Then I don't care what your mum thinks."_

"_I don't either."_

Severus looked up. It was Lupin. "What do you want?" he demanded. He might have stayed in that memory awhile. He relished that one in particular. He could have clung to it, trapped it between his hands, watched it play over and over until he knew every inflection. He had before.

Remus blinked. "I was… just… kind of curious… why you're on the floor."

"Don't you have a curfew to observe?" Severus sneered. How easily that sneer came to him. At the nadir of his existence, he could still abuse a Gryffindor with the best of them.

"So do you," Remus replied equably.

Severus thought he was going to be sick, but what came out were words. "She kissed him," he heard himself say faintly. "It wasn't even his idea. _She_ did it. Her own volition." He stared up at Remus, who blinked at him. "And," he concluded, "they lived happily ever after."

Lupin sat down next to him and wrapped his arms around his knees. Severus was too tired to be mortified that there was a werewolf so close. Imagined peril couldn't compete with veritable desolation.

"You want to talk about it?" Remus asked after a little while.

"No," Severus answered.

"Okay," Remus said. But he didn't leave. He continued to sit there, looking placidly off into space.

"You wouldn't understand," Severus muttered after a few minutes. Jejune at best, he knew.

Thinly Remus smiled. "Sirius Black is one of my best friends," he commented. "Believe me. I understand."

"I don't even want to kill him," Severus realized dazedly.

"That's probably a good thing," Remus decided.

"I just want it… to go away. Never to have happened. Another nightmare." He looked at Remus, who nodded.

No more of this. He couldn't take it anymore. The sympathy, the _understanding_, more than the recollection of the incident itself, was going to tear him to pieces. He staggered to his feet, his head spinning.

"Take care of yourself," Remus said quietly.

Severus stared at him for a moment. It really just didn't make sense. After all of it—after everything—there Lupin was, still offering up little snippets of consolation and concern like so much confetti thrown into a crowd.

"You, too," he returned numbly. Then his feet functioned properly again, and he went.


	16. Wet

_Author's Note: This song is from 1983. I will just defy the laws of time. Screw you, time. You know where to shove it._

_Augh, I found a typo in Chapter Nine, too! THE Chapter Nine! I'm going to go cry myself to sleep. Sob._

_Rowling never explained how seven floors of Hogwarts show up on a two-dimensional map. So I made it up myself._

_Writer's block is the bane of my existence. But when it finally goes away, you get scenes like this last one._

* * *

**CHAPTER SIXTEEN**

**Wet**

Sirius was in the dorm, getting his ass kicked at chess—again. He and Peter were lying on the floor with the chess board between them, and the phonograph was on—as usual. The album was one that Sirius hadn't actually heard before. A woman was singing.

_We are young_

_Heartache to heartache, we stand_

_No promises_

_No demands_

_Both of us knowing_

_Love is a battlefield_

"This is crap, Peter," he remarked, nodding towards the record.

"No, it's Pat Benatar," Peter corrected mildly. He then proceeded to take Sirius's second bishop with sickening ease.

It was at that moment that James walked in, looking like he'd guzzled Dionysus's best vintage and topped it off with some ambrosia. He flopped down on his bed and sighed happily. When the other two ignored him, he sighed happily a bit louder and more obviously.

"What is it?" Peter asked obediently.

"Lily kissed me," James reported breathlessly.

Sirius paused. He then paused while pausing to hate the pun on "paws." That done, he went on to wonder exactly how he felt about this new advent. Was he annoyed that James was usurping his position as the Primary Womanizer? Was he proud of his partner in crime for getting his act together and getting some action? Was he the eensiest bit jealous that he hadn't snapped up Lily Evans first? Was he glad for James—pleased by default because his best friend was so overjoyed, and his brother's feelings spilled over into his? Was he all those things at once?

Or was he just tired of hearing about Lily?

_But if we get much closer, I could lose control_

_And if your heart surrenders, you'll need me to hold_

Sirius wished that infernal Pat Benatar woman would shut up for a few seconds and let him work this out.

"It was the most amazing thing ever," James continued blithely. "I thought I'd died and become proof that there is a heaven. I was thinking how I could go and write theological articles, except that I was dead."

Peter said, "Um."

"Seconded," Sirius noted. "Eloquently put, Pettigrew."

"Thanks."

"Oh, not at all. You deserve it."

"I'm going to ask her to go to Hogsmeade with me this weekend," James declared, apparently blissfully unaware of the way he was being mocked.

"But _we're_ going to Hogsmeade this weekend," Sirius put in, fighting down a bit of anger that flared hot and white in his chest.

"We go to Hogsmeade every weekend," James replied.

"What's your point?"

"I've been to Hogsmeade with you guys a million times. I've never gone with _Lily_." There was another contented sigh, another deep exhalation to release the overflowing passions. Sirius wasn't sure who he was going to bitch-slap first, Jamesy Wamesy or Lily Billy.

"I repeat," he said. "What's your point?"

"That going with Lily is _special_," James answered, reverently.

Sirius was about ready to go find a real lily and shove it up his ass. Preferably a real lily that was covered in iron spikes. "And we're not?" he prompted.

"Your turn," Peter interrupted. He had taken Sirius's knight.

He had also rerouted the fuse that would have lit a pile of dynamite the likes of which the world had never seen—and he probably knew it. James would have unthinkingly said something stupid, Sirius would have killed him and gone to Azkaban, and Peter and Remus wouldn't have had anyone to get them into trouble. This way, with the crisis averted, everybody won. Right?

"I forfeit," Sirius mumbled, getting to his feet.

Peter stared at him. Sirius could understand the incredulity. Usually, he played every game of chess to the bitter end, even when it was painfully clear that he was doomed. But he didn't have the heart for it. Not right now.

Slamming a few drawers getting his toiletries together helped a little, though he wished he had an available skull upon which to shut them. Then again, that would have gotten blood and cranial fluids all over his nice, clean underwear. He contented himself with frowning at the dresser, as if it had personally offended him. As if he actually had a reason for his stomach to be churning the way it was, unsettled by that mysterious, insurrectionist mixture of confusion, resentment, disgust, and melancholy that everything seemed to conjure there nowadays.

He wanted to mutter to himself as he stomped down the stairs, but that was out of the question. Sirius Black did _not_ mutter to himself. He did not talk to himself at all, and if he did, he wouldn't _mutter_, he would shout in a resounding voice and describe the unparalleled notions of his inimitable mind in perfect iambic pentameter.

It was a good thing he had refrained from muttering, because when he reached the common room, Jasmine Levitt and some fifth year—Alana? Elaine? He couldn't remember—were sitting on one of the couches, giggling to themselves.

If there was one thing Sirius didn't understand about women—well, there were about eight thousand things, but if there was one in _particular_—it was the giggling. Not only was it _the_ single most annoying sound in the world (with the possible exception of Regulus singing in the shower), it just seemed… unnatural. Why couldn't they just laugh outright, like normal human beings? Why did they have to be all weird and alien and giggly?

"Hi, Sirius!" Jasmine called. "Want to join us?"

There were few things in the world Sirius wanted less, but the next thing he knew, his feet were carrying him towards them, and then his legs mutinied as well and dropped him into a chair. It was clear that his butt wasn't in on the conspiracy due to the way that it hurt.

"What's new?" he asked.

"Vanessa's got _so_ much homework," Jasmine reported.

_Vanessa?_ Sirius thought absently. He'd been _way_ off on the name.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he replied automatically. Smooth as a rain-slicked street, that was Sirius Black.

"Well, that's life," Jasmine decided with a shrug that she probably thought was very delicate and endearing. "You do what you can."

"Oh, definitely," Sirius agreed.

The thing was, Jasmine wasn't even very cute. In fact, she wasn't too cute at all. In fact, she had buck teeth and kind of a weird chin. But Sirius had sort of vaguely gathered that flirting with something female would make him feel a little better—and, more importantly, would force him to focus on something other than Jamesy Wamesy and Lily Billy.

Speaking of Lily Billy, it wasn't too many minutes of insipid small talk later that she came floating in. Without so much as acknowledging any of the present company—what passed for company, anyway—she then floated up the stairs and disappeared into the girls' dorm.

Sirius hoped vindictively that she'd float out a window and go sailing off through the sky, eventually coming down somewhere in Australia, where she would name kangaroos Jamesy Wamesy until a black mamba put her out of her misery.

"What's _she_ so happy about?" Jasmine giggled.

"I haven't the faintest idea," Sirius lied. _And if you giggle one more time,_ he thought, without much fire, _I'll giggle right back, and _then_ you'll be sorry._

A little more small talk passed a few more minutes, and then Remus came in, looking bemused. That was familiar, at least. Remus looked bemused a lot. Sirius liked to think that he was imagining elaborate ways of killing people behind that innocent exterior.

"Hi, Sirius," Remus said, sitting down nearby. "Hi, Jasmine. Hi, Vanessa."

Of course _he_ knew the names. Remus knew things like that.

"Talk to you a minute, Remus?" Sirius inquired casually. Remus opened his mouth to answer, at which point Sirius grabbed his sleeve and dragged him out into the hall. He pulled the Map out of his pocket, tapped it seven times to make it show the seventh floor, and checked cursorily for potential eavesdroppers. As all looked to be safe, he wiped it clean, shoved it back into his pocket, and looked at Remus. "Lily kissed James," he said bluntly.

Remus opened his mouth. He closed his mouth. He pursed his lips. He raised his eyebrows. And then he opened his mouth again and declared, "I see."

"Glad I didn't," Sirius muttered. "Probably would've made me puke." He sighed. "Gossiping session over. I'm going to go take a bath."

Wincing a little, Sirius thought, Remus put in, "It's after curfew."

Sirius shrugged. "A man's got to be clean one way or another."

"Password's changed," Remus told him, apparently giving up already on dissuading Sirius from violating the rules. "It's 'verified truth' now."

Sirius frowned. "The truth," he decided, "is overrated. Lies can be much nicer."

Like a cat staring at empty air, Remus looked off down the empty corridor. "Lies are fragile," he replied softly. "And as such, they break."

Sirius tried not to think about that statement too much as he made his way down to the Prefect bathroom, using the Map to avoid any messy encounters. As a general rule, he tried not to think about anything too much. If you really thought about things, they didn't hold up, and the next thing you knew, your whole life was in pieces.

Submerging himself in the water was like easing the tightness of a bottleneck. His thoughts started to flow again, smoothly and liberally, instead of smashing themselves against the brick wall of stymie until they bloodied their shoulders. Breaking the surface again, Sirius ran his hands through his hair and breathed deeply of the thick steam rising from the water. He knuckled his eyes and blew out his breath, watching ripples spread.

"What's wrong?" a high, almost warbling voice inquired hesitantly.

Though he was gauging the distance to his wand in his head, Sirius feigned utter calm as he turned slowly. When he saw that it was that Myrtle character, he relaxed.

Myrtle beamed at him. "You can tell me about it," she offered eagerly. "I won't tell anybody."

Sirius considered it. He really did. It was clear that Myrtle would sit there, earnestly nodding and smiling, as he progressed from recapitulation to rant to flat-out tirade. But was that what he needed? Would getting himself worked up about it solve the problem? Of course not. What he needed was a nice, healthy dose of reality followed by a chaser of humility. In short, he needed to get the hell over himself.

"It's really nothing," he said to Myrtle. "I'm overreacting."

Dreamily she smiled. "You're gorgeous," she announced.

A wheel of potential reactions cycled through Sirius's head, coming slowly to a stop so that the pointer would indicate one emotion. What would it be today, ladies and gentlemen? Horror? Disgust? Disbelief? Hilarity?

_Click, click, click, click_… Politeness. Politeness? Well, that was disappointing.

"Thank you," Sirius said.

"You're welcome," Myrtle replied dotingly.

Shrugging mentally, Sirius turned his back on her where she was floating with her chin in her hands like the Cheshire Cat and went about his business. Growing up in a Pureblood family, he'd lived half of his life in front of an audience; he wasn't unsettled by it now.

Well, he did make sure she was gone before he got out. He had _some_ shame.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

By the time Remus trooped up to the dorm, James was asleep, despite the fact that Peter was still listening to his music contentedly. Even as Remus opened his mouth to ask who the artist was, the Fifth Years shouted in unison from the other side of the wall.

"_Turn that shit off_!"

"It's _Pat Benatar_!" Peter yelled back indignantly.

"_We're sleeping_!" they insisted.

"Evidently you're _not_!" Peter replied.

Remus smiled. If there was one thing about Peter, it was that you couldn't fault his logic.

"Jus' turn it off, Peter," James mumbled, muffled both by bleariness and by the pillow in which his face was buried.

Sighing, Peter flipped the appropriate switches and silenced the machine. He tossed himself onto his bed. "Nobody has _any_ musical taste around here," he declared.

Remus had the distinct feeling that musically tasteless teenagers were the least of their worries.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

His ominous feelings came to fruition not long later. And all because of a bit of pumpkin juice.

Remus liked pumpkin juice—_really _liked it. It was a little bit sweet, but not so much that it gave you that feeling like your teeth were coated in sugar, and it had a wonderfully thick consistency. Sometimes, as when he was plagued with ominous feelings and other unpalatable, unrealistic, and nonetheless persistent worries, Remus overindulged.

When he set the third glass of pumpkin juice back on the table, he knew he was going to regret having drunk it. But he had no idea how much.

After two hours of Transfiguration, Remus was jogging his foot impatiently, biting his lip hard, and watching the second hand on the clock. It seemed to be moving excruciatingly slowly simply to taunt him. Oh, what a cruel thing clocks were. Merciless and implacable.

Finally they were released, and Remus shot out of the classroom like he'd been lit on fire.

It was as he was washing his hands fastidiously that the ominousness came to a zenith with two words:

"Hello, Half-Blood."

Startled, Remus looked up. In the mirror he could see a boy standing behind him—the same Slytherin who had threatened him and Noelle. His hands stopped moving, and the water flowed heedlessly and unheeded over his skin.

The boy smiled.

Before Remus could so much as reach for his wand, the Slytherin grabbed his hair in steady, unyielding fingers and slammed his head into the mirror. Glass cracked under his forehead, splintering his reflection, and he was halfway to a cry when the Slytherin jerked him backwards and threw him to the floor. The tiles grazed his elbows; the back of his head slammed against the granite; stars burst wildly before his eyes. Desperately he rolled, scrabbling with his fingers, trying to crawl away, to slink out of range, to disappear, to escape—

He choked on a breath as the Slytherin snatched his collar from behind and yanked backwards, slinging him to his feet. Remus drew blood on his own neck fighting the fabric restricting his windpipe as the Slytherin dragged him backwards towards the wall, where he released his captive. Remus tried to sink to the floor, gasping. The Slytherin seized his shirtfront, hauled him to his feet, waited for him to draw a ragged, reedy breath, and then took it away from him by planting a heavy fist in his stomach. Its brother followed it; they took turns; Remus pushed and writhed and fumbled for his wand only to receive a blow to the face that nearly stole his consciousness. Hearing his own breath whistle forlornly, he looked up into the blank, apathetic face of his assailant. One word beat itself against his brain in synchronism with his thundering pulse.

_Why?_

But he knew why.

The Slytherin wrenched him forward, giving him a moment to lurch dizzily, and then hurled him back against the wall. Once more his head collided with a surface much harder than its own; once more Remus stumbled, but this time, when his knees gave way, the Slytherin let him fall. He tried to catch himself on his arms, but his elbows wouldn't hold, and the gray-green tiles of the floor rose rapidly to meet his cheek. Pain blossomed one more time, blazing and numbing at once. Remus barely felt the foot that connected with his ribs. Something wet was pooling under his head, and from the sharp, invasive metallic scent of it, it was blood. His blood. His half-blood.

Footsteps departed, leaving nothing but the vertigo, the maelstrom of partially-formed thoughts, the throbbing persistence of the pain. Remus closed his eyes. Maybe when he opened them, the hurt would be gone.


	17. Schmaltzy

_Author's Note: I think dramatic irony is an element of its own in stories about the Marauders. It falls into your lap._

_I apologize on Sirius's behalf for his atrocious language. His mother would be ashamed. He, of course, would delight in his mother's shame, but that's a different problem._

_Too much dialogue in this chapter; not enough shazam._

_And sorry about the not updating… forever. I actually wrote this right on the heels of Sixteen and just didn't get around to editing for a long while._

* * *

**CHAPTER SEVENTEEN**

**Schmaltzy**

The voices woke Remus.

"Oh, fuck. Oh, _fuck_. He's—he's—is he—?"

Shaking, unsure fingers probed at his neck. He wanted to flinch away—he had a bruise there—but he couldn't find the strength.

"No—no, he's got a pulse."

"He's breathing—see?"

"Oh, Jesus fucking _Christ_, I'm going to fucking _kill_—"

"Sirius, calm down for a second!"

"_Fuck_ you, James Potter! I will _not_ fucking calm down! Are you fucking _insane_? Am I the only person seeing this? Am I the only one who's going to fucking _destroy_ the person responsible?"

"Let's just get him to Pomfrey first, all right? She'll take care of him."

"Fuck you, James. _We're_ supposed to take care of him. And we fucking _failed_."

"Will you stop _saying_ that?"

"Saying what? 'Fuck'? Well, la-dee-fucking-da, James. Do I fucking offend you? Is it too fucking _rough_ for your fucking _virgin ears_?"

"Guys, stop it. Knock it off."

"Go fuck yourself, Pettigrew."

"Sirius, he's right; we're acting like children—"

"No, James, _you_ are acting like a child. You are acting like a fucking three-year-old ready to go cower under your bed and tremble at the very idea that you might be next."

"I am _not_! I'm not a _coward_!"

"Guys—"

"Oh-ho, struck a nerve, have I? You pissing your pants at the thought, Potter?"

"I'm _not_!"

"_Guys_—"

"Go tell it to your fucking _mommy_, James. Maybe she'll read you a bedtime story and tell you it'll all be okay."

"You _asshole_—"

"_GUYS_!"

There was silence for a moment. Remus summoned his last reserves of energy and lifted his eyelids. He discovered Peter staring down at him. A nervous smile crossed the round face partially silhouetted by the dim light above. With the blurriness of Remus's vision, it almost looked like Peter had a halo.

"Hey, Remus," Peter whispered. "You don't look so good."

Remus tried to focus on Peter's face, felt his body protest, and closed his eyes again. More of the liquid on the floor seeped into his hair. It was cold now. Everything felt very cold.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Remus felt like he'd let his eyes slip shut for a moment, but when he forced them open again, he was lying in the Hospital Wing, and the pale, unmistakable light of morning was darting through the window and creeping across the floor. Though his neck was none too happy about it, he turned his head, and there, to his right, sat Sirius, Peter, and James, like a panel of judges.

But that a panel of judges wouldn't lean forward in frantic unison when they saw that he was awake.

"How is it?" Peter asked nervously.

"How is what?" Remus's voice sounded raspy and faint, even to his own ears. "My dignity, or my corporeal form?"

The three other boys stared at him for a moment.

"Only you, Remus Lupin," Sirius decided.

Remus managed a tremulous smile. It kind of hurt.

"Mister Black, you _will_ not cause trouble in my ward." Pomfrey bustled over and folded her arms across her chest, fixing him with a stern look.

"I didn't do anything!" Sirius protested.

"Yet," Peter added helpfully.

Remus cracked another smile, a stronger one this time.

Pomfrey's hands fluttered. "Stop it! Don't unsettle him!" Before any further protestations of their innocence could be made, she moved to Remus's bedside and began fussing unnecessarily with his sheets. "I fixed your broken rib," she announced, "and closed up the worst of the little cuts and things. The bruises, I'm afraid, will have to heal on their own."

"What bruises?" Remus made the mistake of asking.

James snatched up the mirror lying on the bedside table and shoved it at him. It was then that Remus discovered his gloriously prominent black eye and its contusion cousin along the right side of his jaw.

"Oh," he said dully. "_Those_ bruises."

"I think you may have gotten a bit of a concussion, too, poor dear," Pomfrey noted, patting his shoulder in a sympathetic sort of way.

"That would explain the sudden sense of humor," Sirius commented.

James put on a strained, watered-down version of the usual carefree grin. "I didn't know concussions could do that," he replied.

Sirius shrugged. "Sure. They can do all kinds of things. You probably got dropped on your head as a baby, and that's why you're a git."

James made a show of letting his jaw drop. "Are you—" he paused for ideal dramatic effect. "—_Sirius_?"

"Three million, seven-hundred thousand, two hundred and fifty… one," Sirius said calmly.

"Three million, seven-hundred thousand, two hundred and fifty-one what?" James prompted.

"Times I've heard that shitty joke," Sirius responded.

"Mister Black," Pomfrey interjected in a clipped voice, "you have two choices. Either you be good, or you be off. Am I making myself clear?"

"Clearer than the space between James's ears," Sirius answered obediently.

Pomfrey frowned at him, but after smoothing Remus's coverlet one more time, she moved out of earshot to attend to some other unfortunate soul.

"How'd you find me?" Remus asked first. He'd been saving breath, and he'd decided that this inquiry was most important so far.

"The Map," Sirius explained simply. "You weren't moving. We panicked."

"You mean you did," James corrected.

Sirius ignored him. "Too late to see the—" Glancing sidelong at Pomfrey, he lowered his voice. "—bastard who did it, though." He paused, and Remus realized that he didn't want to push the question of the aggressor's identity given the fiasco after the break-in at the Three Broomsticks.

"I don't know his name," Remus told him, obviating his asking. "Average height—probably two or three inches shorter than you. A little on the heavier side. Blond hair—yellowish-blond. The color of hay. Kind of pale. Brown eyes. Small nose."

"We'll kill him," Sirius promised.

"Or," James countered, raising an eyebrow at him, "just for some variety, we'll play by the rules and get him expelled."

Remus picked at the blanket. "Why me?" he asked slowly.

The others exchanged helpless glances.

Affecting disinterest, Remus attempted at a shrug. It ached, but he supposed it was worth it. "Better me than someone without their friends close at hand," he decided. "How long 'til I get out of here?"

"She's freeing you this afternoon," James supplied.

Contentedly—or contentedly enough—Remus settled among the pillows. "Time enough for a nap," he noted.

"Most of us," Sirius remarked, "use class time for _that_."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

As the three of them left the Hospital Wing and started back towards the common room, Peter paused.

"I think I'm going to go get Remus some food," he announced. He considered and then grinned. "And I'm going to go get _me_ some food, too. Anyone up for coming along?"

"No, thanks" was the consensus.

James shoved his hands into his pockets and kicked a little at the carpet as he and Sirius strolled down the corridor. This was all so… he didn't know what. It was too disorienting to figure out what else it was at all. The idea that someone would go after Remus—Remus Lupin, who wouldn't hurt a fly even if it was threatening him and insulting his mother—was simply disconcerting. It made him almost nauseous to think about it. On top of that, he felt almost… guilty. As if his breeding, which had never come under his control, was somehow exempting him from the terror and the danger to which people like Remus and Peter and Lily were exposed.

He squared his shoulders. If he was safe, it meant that the burden of protecting those that weren't fell on him. Pretty soon he'd find out if he was up to the challenge. Heroes always began as ordinary people, didn't they?

Lily was on her way out when he and Sirius opened the portrait. Just seeing her made James's knees go weak, but he was too busy trying to drink in every infinitesimal detail of her being to find that pathetic.

"Hey, Lily," he managed.

"Hey," she replied, sounding distracted. James wondered what was distracting her. He wondered if he was wondering too much. He wondered if that would annoy her. "How's Remus?" she wanted to know.

"He's getting out this afternoon," James reported. She looked after Remus like you would a little brother. It was adorable. Her capacity for kindness was nothing short of inspiring.

"That's good," Lily decided. She paused.

_Now or never,_ James thought frantically. Desperately he gathered up the trailing threads of the fabric of his courage and took a deep breath. "Lily, do you by any chance want to go to Hogsmeade with me this weekend?" he asked. It all came out in a rush, but it was decipherable enough.

A little smile lighted on her lips—the kiss of a beam of heavenly brilliance, sent for the specific purpose of imbuing her with otherworldly radiance. "Sure, James," she acquiesced. "Talk to you later. See you, Sirius." With that, she slipped out into the hallway and disappeared down it.

James was all ready for the deep, heartfelt sigh—_wait for it… wait for it_—when Sirius muttered, "Prick," and commenced storming up the stairs.

"Ex_cuse_ me?" James said.

"You heard me," Sirius responded over his shoulder. "I called you a prick. Little statement of fact for you."

He slammed the door to the dorm behind him.

James took the steps three at a time and un-slammed it.

"What's your problem?" James demanded.

"I don't have a problem," Sirius shot back.

"Oh, like hell you don't," James retorted. "It's Lily, isn't it? What, you want her too, now? Is that it? Everything else female that moves in this school isn't enough? You've got to have the _one_ girl I've ever liked, too?"

Sirius's lip curled derisively. "Don't be an ass, James."

James threw his hands in the air. "So tell me what the hell's wrong, and I don't have to be!"

"_You_ are!" Sirius burst out, shouting now. "_You're_ wrong, James fucking Potter! Go ahead and marry Lily fucking Evans! I know it's what you're _dreaming_ of! Go ahead, and we'll just sit here twiddling our thumbs and remembering the good old days when we had a _friend_ instead of an _idiot_!"

Incredulously James stared at him. "Wait," he said. "Wait one damn minute."

"For _what_?" Sirius spat. "So you can go consult _Lily_ on what to say next? Oh, she's so fucking _funny_, isn't she? So fucking _witty_. Maybe you should worship her a little fucking _more_, James, I don't think she's _noticed_ yet."

"Will you shut up?" James interrupted. "What are you telling me, that you think I'll neglect you all because of Lily?"

"Think that you _will_?" Sirius repeated. He barked out a short, humorless laugh that felt like a slap in the face. "No, James Potter, I think you already _have_ and will _continue_."

"You're delusional!" James cried. "You are absolutely _delusional_!"

"She's a fucking _girl_, James!" Sirius howled. "She's a fucking girl who's reduced you to this sniveling pile of shit you are now! You know what? Go. Just get the hell out of here. Don't waste my time. It's clear enough that you put her first. And, hey, that's all right. It's not like we have fucking feelings or anything. It's not like we've spent six fucking years cultivating a friendship that you're willing to throw away over that know-it-all, ass-kissing little bitch. It's not like—"

"I should _kill_ you for that," James snarled.

"So kill me!" Sirius laughed that awful laugh again. There was something horrible in it, something wounded and not quite sane. "You know the spell. Just wave your little wand and take out your competition, simple as that."

"Why are you taking it this way?" James persisted. "Why can't you just let her in a little? What's so wrong with her? She wouldn't be a problem—"

"She already _is_ a problem, don't you _get_ it?" Sirius's eyes flashed. There was danger there—danger for James, and danger for Sirius himself. "We're stupid boys. We do stupid boy shit. We talk about stupid boy stuff. And you are letting _her_ get in the way of _us_, and I'm not going to fucking _take_ that shit, James Potter."

"Then don't take it!" James hurled back. "Either you accept everything about me, or you get the hell out of my life! Your choice!"

Before he could move, Sirius had snatched his lapels in both fists and jerked him forward. "And where exactly am I going to go, James?" he hissed. In his best friend's blazing eyes, James could see his own reflection. His face was pale, his cheeks were pink, and his mouth was set in a thin, hard line. "Where," Sirius went on, "am I going to go, and who exactly am I going to lean on?" Nothing but blatant disgust in his expression, Sirius let go at once and gave him a bodily shove. Even as James stumbled and caught himself, Sirius went on, his hands over his face dulling the edge of his voice. "Don't you get it, you fucking idiot? Don't you understand? You are the only thing I've ever been able to rely on. The only thing that's stayed the same, and the only thing that's always been there when I needed it. And now you're letting this _girl_—" Sirius had reached the window; he slammed a fist against it, and the pane trembled. "—twist you up and turn you around and knock you down, and I'm without my anchor." He spun on his heel again, his eyes alight with that mad silver fire. "Is that selfish, James? Is it selfish to want to depend on something? Is it selfish to want to keep the pieces of my life glued together?" He crumpled onto the floor against his bed and hid his face again. "Jesus Christ, James. Jesus _Christ_."

Drawing in a deep breath, James sat down next to him. After a moment of silence, he maneuvered his arm around Sirius's shoulders. The recipient of the gesture didn't move.

"Sirius," James said slowly, "no one, girl or otherwise, is ever going to replace you. Got it?"

"Fucking whatever," Sirius mumbled.

"No, not 'whatever.' I mean it. You're my best friend, like you said. You're not competing with Lily for that position. You're not competing with anyone. It's yours, for life. Forever. No one's going to replace you. No one's going to take it away from you. It's yours as long as you want it."

There was a gasping sort of noise from behind Sirius's hands, and James realized with a start that it was a sob.

"What?" he pressed, horrified now.

"You're so f-fucking _s-s-schmaltzy_," Sirius said.

James sighed—happily.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Severus Snape was lying silently on top of his covers, fully-clothed, with his hands folded on his stomach. He was watching the underside of the canopy on his bed. It wasn't doing anything, but, then, he didn't exactly expect it to break out into a jig.

A shadow fell over him. Douglas Reid said in that rumbling voice of his, "It's time."

Severus got to his feet, smoothed his robes, took his wand in his hand, and followed.


	18. Dark

_Author's Note: Hell. Don't even read this; go read The Shoebox Project and forget I ever presumed to try to write a story about the effing Marauders._

_Revel in my inferiority complex._

_I'm going to stop bashing myself and attempt to get my priorities straight now. Don't mind me._

_Today's excuse: You would not believe how stymied I was on this story. Like sriusly omg it was lyk the worst thing evr lol._

_And then I just got extraordinarily lazy. I really, really, really apologize. Like, really._

_Chapter beta'd (betaed?) by the lovely Eltea. +4 to grammar._

* * *

**CHAPTER EIGHTEEN**

**Dark**

Darkness stalked in the Forest, poised to pounce. Shadows skulked within its velvet folds, sliding just out of sight, flirting with the corners of the eyes. Thick, burgeoning white mist swathed the trees like so much cotton, injecting a damp, desolate humidity into the chill of the night.

It took almost all of Severus Snape's willpower not to shiver.

Douglas Reid was trudging placidly along before him—if a boy of that size and temperament could do _anything_ placidly. The others were there, too, and that absurdly eager Regulus boy—the _other_ Black brother; less outright outrageous but sufficiently marred by his own vast collection of annoying idiosyncrasies—was almost literally bouncing up and down with excitement. He didn't know anything. He thought this was all a game. Severus wasn't sure whether he wanted to beat the fool upside the head or break down and cry.

He settled with picking his way around a patch of particularly odious mud and reviewing the plan in his head, one last time.

They would find the clearing. They would set up. The interested members of the student body would arrive—that was, all the Slytherins, a smattering of high-minded Ravenclaws, and potentially a few Hufflepuffs who had been toying with the idea. (One girl had asked if they would invite any Gryffindors. She'd been laughed at until she almost burst a blood vessel blushing.) One of the Seventh Years would give a speech; a few graduate Death Eaters would make a dramatic entrance; they would demonstrate a few especially interesting and insidious spells. Severus had managed to come up with one of his own for the occasion, and he thought it would look pretty impressive. Then everyone would go home—that was, back to the castle. It was nothing more and nothing less than a recruitment exercise.

So why did it feel like he was marching purposefully towards the Apocalypse?

Something about it just unnerved him. Given, he would have opened his own jugular vein with his fingernails before admitting it, but… There was just something wrong here, in the jutting angles of the shadows and the hard determination in the others' eyes. He felt vulnerable. Stranded. Lost.

Meticulously he arranged his features into an expression of perfect impartiality. If he showed emotion here, in this place, in this company; if he let blood dribble out into the water and diffuse away; if he showed so much as a fragment of a hint of fear, he was dead. And if there was one thing in the world that Severus Snape did not want to be, "dead" was unequivocally it.

That wasn't entirely true, or not all the time. But if he was going to die… He didn't want it to be here. Not in this moist, ugly place, with its twisted trees and its strangling vines seeking his shoes. He wanted it to be at his behest. On his whim. In a time and place of his choosing; in a warm, snug room illuminated only by a modest, crackling fire, with the blade thin and shining and accessible in his skeletal fingers and the pulse under his skin strong and steady and destructible. Then there would be a grandeur and a nobility in the way in which it slowed… slowed… slowed… and stopped. Measured and collected; two things he had never quite managed to be in life.

But the Forest—the Forest was a world of untried, untested, unlimited imagination, of lurking horror and oppressive mystery. Suddenly, with dizzying force, he was struck by the desire to get out of here, to run as fast as his feet would consent to carry him. It was a mad wish, a flash of lunacy assaulting the cold logic to which he clung to survive in an endlessly disappointing world. He pushed it away. There would be no running. It was far too late for that now. It was too late to do anything but trail after Douglas Reid, knowing that they were teetering on the cusp of the moment when it all came together—when it all soared among the wispy clouds or slammed into the ground like a bird with broken wings.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Moon's waxing, isn't it?" Sirius remarked, magnanimously employing his forearm to shield his friends from the might of his subsequent yawn.

Remus looked up abruptly. "Yes," he said simply.

Sirius nodded to himself. "I don't need a calendar," he noted. "I can use Remus as an indicator of the lunar cycle. When the moon's new, he's normal; when it's waxing, he gets all jittery and fidgety; when it's full, we go stargazing; and when it's waning again, he sniffs the air a lot and itches behind his ears until he gets back to normal again."

The patch of skin behind Remus's right ear itched right on cue, and he fought the urge to jog his right knee up and down a little. He pointedly ignored both rebelling pieces of his anatomy and then focused on trying not to tap his quill bemusedly on his essay.

Sirius loosed another tremendous yawn, which stretched his jaw and probably aspired to shaking the foundations of the castle. "Gentlemen," he said, "it is Friday night, and _none_ of us is out on a hot date. What is wrong with this picture?"

Remus smiled. "The fact that you're surprised," he answered.

"Silence, you. Your insolence is not appreciated."

"It's an affront to his vast and noble pride," James commented from where he was sprawled out on the couch, gangly limbs draping everywhere like limp spaghetti.

"You're damn right it is," Sirius confirmed. "And this frigging Charms essay is an even bigger affront. Such a big affront that I think I'm going to sneak into Flitwick's bedroom in the dark of the night, stuff him in a burlap bag, and go toss him into the coldest, dirtiest, most unpalatable freight car on the next train to Siberia."

"Siberia?" It was James's turn to yawn; he smacked his lips afterward. "Can't you think of anywhere more remote than that?"

"No. Can you? 'Cause I'd take that instead, if you could."

"I'll work on it. Why just Flitwick? Can you send McGonagall along, too? I'm getting tired of all this test preparation. Extremely tired. She knows we're all just going to wing it anyway. Well, all of us except Remus, who'll work like a dog studying and then blow everyone away with his scores."

Remus blushed happily.

"'Work like a dog'?" Sirius repeated airily. "And how exactly would he do that? Lie around with his tongue lolling out, asking himself to write his essay for him? Because that's how _I_ work."

"Mangy cur," James noted unconcernedly.

"Eh. A little unkempt. I wouldn't say _mangy_, per se."

"Fair enough. Unkempt cur."

The contagious yawn that had been making its insidious way around the room reached Remus at last. He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus them on the lines he was writing, but it didn't work very well. They crawled around on the page like a photographic negative, dark worms in white soil, squirming impatiently, and after a moment of squinting at them, he gave up and fought his way unsteadily to his feet.

"I'm going to go take a bath," he announced.

"Have fun," Sirius replied. There was a pause. "In the get-your-mind-out-of-the-gutter-James kind of way," he amended.

"Fishing it out as we speak," James replied.

"What would you bait James's mind with?" Peter mused.

Sirius snorted. "I'll give you a hint, Pete. It starts with 'L,' and it ends with 'ily Evans.'"

"Cheap shot," James declared, resignedly it seemed.

"C'mon, Jamesy. It was too _easy_. Give me a challenge next time, won't you?"

"Yeah, I'll challenge you to walk with the tree trunk I'm going to jam up your a—"

It was on that rejoinder that Remus closed the portrait, and it was on that rejoinder that he was still meditating bemusedly—and _amusedly_—when toweling at his hair twenty minutes later. Soon the carpet, lush and elaborate, whiled itself away beneath his carelessly bare feet, and he had already opened his mouth to speak the password when he paused.

Remus Lupin believed in second chances. He had received a thousand of them, a million, a number that defied counting, most of them unsolicited and all of them undeserved. And so it was that he went to the wide bank of windows one last time.

The condensation of his breath on the icy surface of the nearest windowpane could not conceal the inky blot of humanity slithering towards the edge of the Forest.

Remus had always cynically wondered what genius had thought that calling the place the "Forbidden Forest" would do anything but entice a school full of teenagers to head towards it with all possible speed.

What it was that compelled him—the Prefect's righteousness, the wolf's nose for the ominous, the human's insurmountable curiosity—Remus didn't know, but compelled he was. Compelled—if not dragged.

He was wearing drawstring pajama pants and an old gray T-shirt, his feet were still barer than birth, and he was running full-tilt across the dewy lawn, uneven breaths jerking out from his throat as ragged puffs of mist, his heart threatening to tear its way free of his chest, moving ever closer to the intricate chaos that was the Forest.

Just how many accounts of Creation spoke of a primordial pandemonium, touched and altered by a benevolent deity, giving rise to all life? And here he was—at the boundary of a patch of preserved wildness. At the fringe of an isolated reversion to the world of before. At the edge of one of the Old Places.

And in he plunged.

Broken twigs and jagged stones cut into the tender soles of his feet, but Remus ran softly, only the whisper of the fabric of his clothing, the gentle pattering of his steps, and the draw and release of each breath betraying that he was there at all. Those breaths grew gradually steadier. His strides became even. The wolf knew how to run. The only thing it did better than running was killing.

His quarry gave itself away with the profusion of milky white wandlight that filtered eerily through the trees. Panting lightly, Remus slowed his pace to a crawl and crept after them.

The tension was almost tangible. Remus thought he could taste it—sharp and acrid, digging its claws into the tongue. This was something important. That much was incontrovertible.

Severus trailed at the end of the group like a comet reluctantly jerked into a lopsided orbit.

Remus closed in.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sirius had found a bottle of bubble syrup. James did not know whence this object had come; he did not know how Sirius had produced it from nowhere; he did not know who had been stupid enough to sell such a thing to one Sirius Black. What he _did_ know was that it was the single most annoying thing since, oh, EVER.

A bubble touched his forehead and popped. Distractedly he swiped at the faint filmy residue and frowned hard at his Transfiguration essay, willing words to come to him. Shortly, a thick current of bubbles whooshed directly at him to burst in machine gun succession all over his nose, cheeks, and glasses.

"Sirius!" he howled, scrubbing maniacally at his soapy skin and succeeding only in spreading a nice lather.

Calmly Sirius tossed his hair out of his face, pursed his lips, and blew delicately through the window of the bubble wand, begetting another cluster of shining, perfect, opalescent spheres. Lazily he ruptured a fat, lingering specimen with one long finger and rubbed absently at the resulting sudsy coating on his fingertip. "Where the hell's Remus?" he wanted to know.

"Hiding from you?" James hazarded, scouring at his glasses with a fistful of his sweater. "That's what _I'd_ be doing."

Sirius chose to ignore that particular comment. "Hope he didn't drown," he remarked.

"I'm pretty sure he can swim," Peter noted.

"Unless he _deliberately_ drowned himself," Sirius replied offhandedly.

There was a long and painful pause. No one wanted to laugh it off, and no one wanted to scoff and discount it, because it simply seemed too… possible. Likely? No. Realistic, even? Doubtful. But possible? Yes. Terribly, horribly, miserably possible. There was something of that to Remus Lupin, something fragile, something cautiously balanced, and gleaming in that nuanced existence like pyrite in a mountainside was that possibility. It sent through James a shiver that jittered every part of his body down to his littlest toe.

"To hell with this," Sirius decided, shifting in his seat. "I'm cheating." He drew out the Map, unfolded it, and began to tap it systematically with his wand. As he progressed downward from the seventh floor, the easy indifference fell from his face, piece by piece. First it was the appearance of the line between the dark slashes of his eyebrows. Then the slight narrowing of his eyes.

He was unabashedly biting his lip by the time he reached the first floor and, as James, standing at his shoulder, saw clearly, panned over the grounds. In the Forest, there was a mass of black dots so close together that their edges blurred and their names tangled. Just behind them were blazoned two separate circles.

One was labeled _Remus Lupin_, and the other _Severus Snape_.

"Well, shit," Sirius said. Then he jammed the Map into his pocket, shrugged his coat over his shoulders, and exploded out of the common room at a run.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Severus caught sight of Remus out of the corner of his eye. He whipped his wandering gaze towards Douglas Reid's cloak again, his mind whirling into action. Remus Lupin was not supposed to be here. And now that he was, he ran the very real risk of getting himself killed.

Severus's incorrigible mind had, of course, done the appropriate calculations. Though the math was rough at best, the odds were clearly not in Remus's favor. Remus, judging by his continued presence, did not seem to grasp the subtle concept of his own impending destruction.

Inwardly, Severus sighed. Then, carefully, he faded back from the group, letting them move gradually farther ahead until the light from their wands began to dim, disappearing among towering trees draped with moss like corrupted lace. To his confident expectation, his venomous vexation, and his intense relief, Remus, seeming bewildered, slowed with him.

Severus tightened his grip on his wand and turned to face the other boy. "You shouldn't have come, Lupin," he commented.

Remus found his own wand and clenched it in his hand. There was something foreign in his face—something hard and indomitable. "Well, I did," he replied.

Severus shrugged. "There's still time to change your mind."

Remus looked at him for a moment, almost sardonically. Then they both moved at once.

"_Expell_—"

The words that leapt out of Severus's mouth were the ones that he had labored over for weeks, the ones he had transcribed unthinkingly on his homework and had to scratch out, the ones he had whispered to himself over and over as he lay trying to sleep. They had been frothing in his throat all night, and now they snatched their chance for release.

"_Depulsia coacto_!" he shouted, his arm straighter than a meter-stick, the trembling of his hand just barely too faint to mar the spell.

There was a great and pervasive rumbling as the air bowed to Severus's whim. For a moment, pebbles danced on the ground, and leaves quivered where they clutched the arching branches that nurtured them. Then the fabric of the empty space compressed and collected, gathering itself into an invisible block that gave Remus Lupin one formidable shove.

It slammed him into a broad tree trunk; the body crumpled among the rolling roots and lay still. Mist curled in around it, wreathing the figure as if to protect it from further harm.

The others had heard the noise and were approaching fast.

"What the fuck did you _do_?"

"Is that a _person_?"

"Did you kill him, or what?"

"I took care of it," Severus stated, raising his single voice over the grating cacophony of their different ones.

"What do you mean, you—"

"_I took care of it_," he repeated, louder still. Then he swept through their ranks and pounded down the path towards the clearing. Over his shoulder he added vituperatively, "Are you coming? Or do you want Malfoy to think we can't make it to an appointment _we've_ set?"

The gears in their primitive heads turned, and then they followed.


	19. Thick

_Author's Note: Let's give a warm welcome to our newest HotW friend… Badass!Remus. Hi, Badass!Remus. How are you?_

_Hellz yeah._

_I had a little too much fun with Stefan Ellis. Sorry about that. Plus I left you guys in the middle of the climax. I'm a mean, mean person._

_And if you're ever in doubt… This is NOT SLASH. EVER. AT ALL. IN THE SLIGHTEST. REMOTELY. NO. BLECHHH._

_This was a public service announcement from Tierfal. Thank you for listening._

_Two last things: Sorry to make my Awesome Climax into more of an exercise in dry humor; and once again I owe this chapter's grammar to the inimitable Eltea._

_Your reward for reading all that is that this chapter is frigging huge. And that the last chapter should be up by Halloween at the latest._

* * *

**CHAPTER NINETEEN**

**Thick**

Sirius Black was having trouble thinking.

This was not, though his enemies might have trumpeted the conclusion far and wide, because he was stupid. On the contrary, Sirius was very intelligent, and he knew it. Maybe if he'd gone and gotten himself Sorted into Ravenclaw, dear Mum and Dad might not have blasted his name right off of the fucking family tree, ha-ha-ha.

No, he wasn't stupid. Just terrified to the verge of hysteria.

When he reached the border of the Forest, he stopped, and James and Peter caught up momentarily, puffing prodigiously. Sirius was bent over, palms on his thighs, panting for all he was worth. He couldn't think, couldn't _think_, couldn't _THINK_; and consequently he was powerless.

"James, head left; Peter, go right, towards the Willow," he gasped out, pointing vaguely. "I'll go straight ahead. Yes? Yes."

Without waiting for their answers—or, more likely, their protests—he heaved himself up and took off again.

It was only after he'd lost sight of them that he remembered the Map.

Tripping over one piece of plant matter or another, he managed to come to an ungainly halt and wrangled the folded sheet out of his pocket. Hearing his pulse like rhythmic thunder in his ears, like war drums on the final charge, like a resonating death knell, he flattened the parchment against a nearby tree with shaking hands.

He saw the Remus Lupin dot, stranded in an empty field of cartoonish trees. It wasn't moving.

"OhfortheloveofChrist," he heard himself breathe. His unsteady fingertip traced its way down to the Sirius Black dot. It was directly southeast of the Remus one.

Crumpling the paper carelessly in one hand, he ran.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The others were flowing around Severus again by the time they reached the designated clearing. Despite the slight delay, they were just about on time. Severus supposed that he could take some small comfort in the fact that he knew his spell worked.

It did not, however, assuage the overwhelming guilt prompted by the cowing knowledge that he might well have killed Remus. If it had been, you know, _Sirius_, they would have named a holiday after him and had him lead a parade, but Lupin—someone might actually _miss_ that kid.

He had to clasp his hands tightly behind his back to prevent them from fidgeting nervously. They wanted to toy with his robes, with his hair, with his wristwatch; they wanted to pluck spiny leaves off of the squatting bushes, tear them into strips, and let the pieces flutter to the ground, just to give his fingers something to do.

But that would be the end of him.

A couple of snooty Ravenclaws managed to make their way through the Forest to arrive a few minutes fashionably late, and on their heels came a pair of sullen-looking Hufflepuffs. The girl, who had plain brown hair tied in two even braids that flopped over her shoulders, was pulling impatiently on the boy's sleeve. The boy, who was sandy-haired and dark-eyed, was largely ignoring her.

Ten minutes ago, Severus would have clapped him on the shoulder. Now he wanted to slap him in the face.

Biting back a wordless cry was significantly harder than he would have imagined.

Douglas Reid curled one meaty hand inside the other and cracked his knuckles melodramatically. "Guess that's everyone," he remarked. "So. Obviously if you're here, you know where the power is. Because it's not back in that pansy-ass castle, with that fuckin' phoenix singing it lullabies, I can tell you that."

Douglas was not known for his public speaking abilities.

Stefan Ellis, a Fifth Year, stepped in front of him. The action proved two things: first, that Stefan was smart enough to realize that Douglas, left to his own devices, would scare away the entire school down to the last hotshot Third Year; and second, that Stefan was stupid—or perhaps suicidal—enough to interrupt Douglas Reid.

"Ladies and _gentlemen_," Stefan declared, setting his hands on his hips, "I've got something I'd like to tell you all." Thinking about it, Stefan would have been a remarkably good choice for the mouthpiece of the movement. There was something about the set of his slim shoulders that made you want to trust him, something about the glint of intellect in his eye that made you want to listen to him, and something about the conspiratorial tilt of his slightly crooked smile that made you feel special when you did. He boasted his fair share of imperfections—an unimpressive height, for one, and rather protrusive ears, for another—which only served to make him seem more approachable. Stefan combed his dark hair back almost like a helmet, and however much Severus might mercilessly ridicule the style under his breath, it opened Stefan's face and only contributed to that odd, preternatural charm of his. Somehow, between the words and the face and the demeanor, Stefan Ellis managed to be unerringly slick without ever seeming oily.

Thus it was that the assembled students fell first into silence and then into fascination.

"That's right," Stefan went on pleasantly, adjusting his green and silver tie, the perfect measure of self-satisfaction in his smile. "Like my illustrious colleague so eloquently pointed out, you wouldn't be here if you weren't interested, but maybe you don't realize just how interested you _should_ be. Here, take a look at this." He waved his audience in closer, and Severus had to concentrate to prevent himself from obeying the summons. Stefan Ellis was like that. It was at once completely captivating and utterly disgusting.

Pausing just long enough to allow the congregation to suck in an anticipatory breath, Ellis drew back his sleeve, slowly and deliberately, until the faint outline of the Mark was visible on the skin of his forearm, pale in the weak light. For his pains, Ellis earned himself two gasps, a few appreciative murmurs, and a sprinkling of mutters about flashy showmanship that came from his fellow initiates.

"_Wicked_," Regulus Black whispered. The irises of his wide, shining eyes looked almost white in the light cast by his wand, brandished like a torch in his right hand.

"More than you can imagine," Ellis assured him, his voice soft and low. "More than you can begin to dream. You want to know what it's like? I'd tell you if I could. But words—words just won't do it. They're not enough. You have to _be_ there, to _feel_ it, to _try_ it, to know. There's no other way."

"I'll do it," Regulus responded immediately, his gaze locked onto the grayish lines carved into Stefan Ellis's skin. "I'll do whatever it takes."

Just as the words left his lips, the tree behind Regulus Black was obscured by a burst of blood-red smoke accompanied by a sound like a gunshot.

Severus very nearly jumped out of his skin. He had one hand on his heart and one on his wand when Lucius Malfoy strolled out of the diffusing smoke and brushed a bit of something—probably imaginary—off of one shoulder.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

James Potter was lost.

Or at least, he thought he was. None of this looked remotely familiar, and for someone who'd gone traipsing around in the Forest on more than one occasion, that was really saying something.

It wasn't that he liked the Forest. He didn't, not at all. It gave him the creeps—in that deep, bone-chilling, shiver-so-hard-it-hurts way that nothing else but recurring nightmares could do. What he liked was the idea of braving the wilderness and the stigma, turning up his nose at the danger.

Right now, that danger seemed just a little too pertinent. And just a little too likely.

"I hate you, Sirius," he mumbled, more to give himself something to listen to than anything else. The shadows shifted like things alive, and his glasses were sliding down the bridge of his nose as if they, too, wanted nothing more than to flee with arms flailing, screaming like a little girl.

He stared into the darkness a bit more. He was getting that feeling in his stomach—the thick nausea that always came with the unfortunate and inevitable revelation that whatever he was doing was totally pointless. If there was anything he could have _done_, he would have done it, but there wasn't.

Drawing in a deep breath, he let it out as a long sigh. He looked both ways, checking for potential observers, and then he became the stag.

Suddenly, he felt a lot less hopeless. Instead he felt… calm. Confident. _Regal_.

He put his nose to the breeze and sought the scent of the dog-boy.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The mist was thick, and the darkness was thicker.

Sirius stumbled and faltered; stumbled and staggered; stumbled and fell. He pulled himself to his feet, scrabbled for his wand, found it, and started off again.

After eons, after forever, after eternity had come and gone, after Sirius Black had had years upon years to wonder whether he was moving erratically in the right direction, after he had checked the Map a thousand times, his wand illuminated a pale foot, visible where it rested upon a tree root.

He stopped short. Then he darted forward, dropped unceremoniously to his knees, and gathered the unmoving boy up against his chest.

Sirius cradled Remus's torso in both arms, looking down into the white face of its owner.

"Don't be dead," he managed to warn the boy slung over his arms, his voice strangled by the vice-like tightness in his throat. "For the love of _God_, Remus, don't be dead. You love God, don't you? He's a great guy, really."

Grains of dirt were lodged in Remus's eyelashes, more of it smeared on his bloodless cheeks like war-paint. The bruises looked even darker in contrast to the horribly pallid skin, as though the hand of death had grazed him with a fingertip, leaving lifeless blots of grayish purple in its wake. Remus's eyelids flickered faintly like butterflies' wings and then rose, and in his eyes there blazed something Sirius had never seen there before.

It was unprecedented, unparalleled, unadulterated rage.

"...Remus?" Sirius prompted hesitantly.

Before he had finished the second syllable, the owner of the name was drawing himself to his feet. Bewilderedly Sirius helped him up.

"Let's go," he urged, tugging at Remus's arm, alarmed at the way his friend stood still, his gaze on the trees before him. "Come _on_, Remus. Time to get the hell out of here, eh?" His attempt at a nervous laugh yielded nothing more than a wheezy breath that sounded very scared.

"No more running," Remus said quietly, his voice so hoarse as to be barely audible. "Not now. Not anymore."

"What are you talking about?"

Remus turned on him, and his eyes glinted sharp and dark and cold. "I have run," he replied, slowly and distinctly, "from every hint of danger in my life—every harsh word, every veiled threat, every moment of unease. No running this time. I'm finished running."

"You're going _over_ there?" Sirius demanded incredulously.

"'There is a tide in the affairs of men,'" Remus said, "'which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.'"

"What the hell does that mean?"

"It's Shakespeare." Remus added this part over his shoulder as he started off into the trees.

"Yeah?" Sirius shouted at his retreating back, sounding embarrassingly shrill even to his own ears. "Is 'You've lost your fucking mind' Shakespeare?"

Remus ignored him.

"_Remus Lupin, you get back here_!"

Remus ignored him again. Before Sirius could articulate another command, the ravenous woods had swallowed the shadowy figure of the vulnerable boy.

"_Fuck_!" Sirius screamed at the trees, knitting his fingers into his hair, trying to yank it out as if he could rip out his frustrations in the same motion.

The trees—those unfeeling bastards—weren't listening.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Malfoy had always had a flair for the overdramatic.

Like wire in a flame, a thin smile curled its way onto his face. The expression was just as cowing as the smoke and mirrors section of the program.

Predictably, the Lestrange brothers appeared, by unadorned Apparition, on either side of Lucius where he stood smirking.

"Good evening," he drawled. "I presume you're all having a pleasant time."

_That's because you're a presumptuous bastard,_ Severus thought absently.

"I would like you to trust me," he went on, "when I say that if there is anything making you hesitate to take the Mark, there shouldn't be. Hesitation is an outward sign of cowardice. Don't succumb to that." He put on his sympathetic face for a moment to drive the point home. People were shifting uneasily. Lucius had never been particularly popular. He was too insidious by half and too clever by three-quarters, and everyone here was old enough to remember him strutting around Hogwarts like his father had gone and bought the school for the hell of it—a concept all the more unsettling for its plausibility.

"I hope you'll consider it a matter of utmost importance," Malfoy was going on. "We have to do something, don't you see? The Dark Lord is the first person in centuries who has worked for the welfare of people like you and me—the _real_ wizards. The heirs of _real_ sorcery. Are we going to let Mudbloods clutter up our classrooms, pretending they belong?" His voice was gradually rising in volume; there was genuine passion in it. "_Are_ we? Are we going to bow aside, handing privilege upon privilege to mere_ Muggles_ with circumstantial claims to _our_ skill?" He cast an eye over his audience, one white eyebrow arched high. "_I'm_ not. Neither is the Dark Lord. But he and I can't do it alone."

All things considered, it was a pretty decent piece of propaganda, Severus thought. Concise. Racist. True.

"Now," Malfoy said softly, "I'd like to open this up to questions."

Regulus Black's hand shot up into the air.

Malfoy frowned. Clearly he remembered Regulus. "Yes?"

"When can we get start—"

It was then that Remus Lupin, mud-splattered and wild-eyed, wearing nothing more or less than his pajamas, stormed into the clearing.

"This is a safe place," he declared into the silence. "As such, you have no right to be here." His eyes narrowed. "So get out."

There was a long pause, and a little more of Remus's sanity seemed to evaporate away.

"Go on!" he shouted, making a dismissive motion with one outstretched arm. "Get out of here! Go home!"

Lucius Malfoy's light, light eyes roved lazily to the Lestranges, who shrugged in unison. Then they roved lazily to Lupin. Languidly Malfoy raised his wand, the very angle of his wrist teeming with elegance and superciliousness. "_Petrif_—"

"_Depulsia coacto_!" Lupin roared.

Malfoy did the most undignified thing Severus had ever seen him do: He got thrown against a tree and was quite summarily knocked unconscious.

Severus hated how impressed he was that Lupin had performed _his_ spell—performed it _perfectly_, no less. On the first try. Without practicing. Having only seen it once, mere seconds before being hit by it. There was just something deeply _unfair _about the whole thing.

There wasn't much time to ponder the subject, as the firefight began almost immediately.

The Lestranges stared for a moment at the recumbent figure of their leader, his limbs splayed at unnerving angles, before the shock on their faces dissolved into fury. Both delved hands into robes in search of wands; Rabastan, thin face alight with malicious excitement, was faster than his brother.

"_Furnunculus_," he snarled.

"_Protego_!" Lupin countered. Barely had the shield fallen after absorbing the spell before he added, not without some vindictiveness, "_Locomotor Mortis_."

Rabastan's sputtering rage was a thing to behold as the curse snapped his legs together and locked them, and he tottered once and then tumbled to the ground, arms pinwheeling.

The dust hadn't settled before Rodolphus pointed his wand unrepentantly at Remus, bellowing, "_Defodio_!"

Remus ducked it and retaliated with a Conjuctivitis Curse that missed Rodolphus's shoulder by centimeters, and by then the stone had unfrozen and the others had remembered their own existence.

In a matter of seconds, the duel had become a fray.

Before Severus had even figured out the odds against Remus, Sirius Black's unbearably arrogant face was right up in his.

"Hey, asshole," Sirius greeted him cheerfully.

"_You_—" Severus began.

"_Reducto_," Sirius interrupted equably.

Severus heard himself yell as the spell swept him aside. He heard himself hit the tree, heard himself groan faintly, and, through blurry eyes, saw Sirius's small, thin, bleak smile at his handiwork. Then everything went black.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

James loped placidly through the forest. The night was beautiful. The night was _beauty_.

He was following the trail that the dog-boy's scent left in olfactory neon when the impression of its color changed from yellow to red. James paused, considered, and continued. Shortly, the trail went blinding white. Then it entered a clearing full of chaos.

A stag became a boy, and a boy darted into the mêlée and flattened a Slytherin with a deft Confundus Charm.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Either Sirius had gone mad, or he'd just caught a glimpse of James.

Both explanations were about equally probable.

He dodged a curse, snapped a nice Full-Body Bind on his short, dark-haired opponent, and glanced around again. Yes, there was James, fighting side-by-side with the Hufflepuff girl with the two braids, her comrade not far off. And beyond them was Remus, scattering spells with reckless abandon as if it was what he had been meant for all his life.

Maybe it was.

He pushed the grim thoughts away, as he always did, because grim—haha, _Grim_—things made him feel like his head and heart were competing to see who could explode faster.

Turning abruptly on his heel, he almost smashed right into Regulus.

"Wh—" he began.

Regulus's eyes were narrowed to slits. His lip curled, his wrist bent to adjust the angle of his wand, and he spat, "_Crucio_," as if it was the ugliest word in the world.

It was.

Sirius stared at him dumbly. There was a response in his mind, whirling around and around its edges, slamming against the walls, but he couldn't choke it out.

_How could you? My best friend, my little brother, my Regulus—how _could_ you?_

"_Stupefy_!"

The pain was gone almost before it came. Stars combusted, blazes of blinding white, against Sirius's eyelids, for no more than a moment, and then he was looking down at Regulus where the boy lay sprawled on the ground.

His knees gave way, and he sat down hard, his tailbone making a vociferous protest. He wanted to sit there, sit there forever, sit there and sob until his tear ducts ran dry; sob until the tears cut canals into his cheeks, their channels lined with accumulated salt; sob until sleep or death or Judgment Day came, and all the insanity swirled slowly to a halt like a merry-go-round.

Instead he took the hand James offered and pulled himself to his feet.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Remus was not thinking about the fact that he had just Confunded one Slytherin, Stunned another, and used _Incarcerous _to immobilize a third. His proverbial engine was running on fragments of leftover anger, on wisps of noxious fumes, on… empty. The spells leapt to his lips and jerked free, sailed through the air, and found their marks almost of their own volition now. Instinct was all he had and all there was.

Fortunately, the wolf's instincts were sound.

"_Remus_!"

He had almost conjured a shield when he realized that it was his name rather than another curse—and, furthermore, that Sirius was grabbing his arm and yanking him out of the thick of things.

They ran. It seemed horribly natural, running like hell.

Thinking about it, there were no two guys in the world alongside whom Remus would rather be panting for breath, leaping over tree roots, and shoving through brambles, racing like the highest-ranked and the hungriest of demons hounded his heels. It was a comforting thought.

Well, sort of.

They were on the shining castle lawn before they stopped to breathe.

"Do you have the Cloak?" Remus managed.

The noise that James made might have been a laugh. It might also have been the sound of him dying.

"I've got the Map," Sirius volunteered, his voice low and hoarse. Moonlight played on pale skin as shaking hands retrieved it and unfolded it. "I solemnly swear that—_HOLY FUCK_!"

The tip of his wand inches from the face that had appeared at Sirius's shoulder, Remus shouted, "_Petrific_—"

Then he saw.

"Wh—Peter?" he asked.

"Sorry," Peter squeaked, removing his hands from Sirius's arm to hold them up in surrender.

James made the dying sound again, and this time, Remus joined him.


	20. Complete

_Author's Note: Game. Set. Match._

_Some of this seems a little frivolous after last chapter, but I think that's almost the point, you know?_

_In any case, lots of love to swiftlystarlit, sirval, Eltea, Luthien and Tari Oronar, Aequalitas, vampassassin, and bookworm914 for the support. You guys pwn._

_Eltea's Formidable Beta Powers ™ are at work here again._

_I'm really sad this is over. I am also extremely relieved._

_Happy Halloween!!!_

* * *

**CHAPTER TWENTY**

**Complete**

Days passed. No words were spoken of the incident; none of the participants received notice of their imminent expulsion; no sixth-year Gryffindors were killed in their sleep. The bruises on Remus's face faded, and the cuts on the soles of his feet closed. He really only had to walk gingerly for a day or two. And, by some miracle, or perhaps because they didn't want to imagine differently, no one questioned his explanation that he'd forgotten to jump a trick step and fallen down the stairs.

He made the mistake of mentioning the tacit acceptance of his injuries to Sirius, who said that everyone probably assumed he was in an abusive relationship with some spitfire Ravenclaw feminist. When Remus had managed to stop laughing and recommence breathing, Sirius noted, significantly more solemnly, that given the usual evidence of his transformations, people were probably somewhat accustomed to seeing him hurt.

A Friday came, as Fridays tend to do, and upon this particular Friday, Sirius looked remarkably smug—more so, even, than usual. He swaggered to his classes and sat complacently through them, a contented little smile fiddling constantly with his lips as if it couldn't decide just how wide and satisfied it wanted to be.

It was clear to Remus that Sirius had done something. What wasn't evident was _what_ he'd done, i.e. the important part.

Trying and failing to contain his effulgent glee, Sirius excused himself early from dinner and dashed off, citing something vague that involved "dire" and what sounded like "kittens." Remus had an immediate mental image of Sirius amassing an army of attack kittens. He attempted to shake his head and clear the picture from his mind, but it didn't want to go. He could see Sirius pacing back and forth, jabbing occasionally at a detailed map of a battleground. _General Fluffy, you will take the western flank; Lieutenant Princess, your men will reinforce Captain Tiger. Is that understood? Excellent. Turn them into minced salmon, men!_

James frowned, tracing curly designs in his mashed potatoes with his fork. "I don't like this," he announced.

"Neither do I," Remus replied mildly, working very hard to bar the kitten troops from reentry into his brain.

"Nothing for it," Peter noted through a mouthful of meatloaf, "but to wait and see."

"Ominous," James remarked.

"Very ominous," Remus agreed.

Their concern was not groundless. When they reached the common room, they saw, plastered over the fireplace, a very large poster. In lavish, prominent script at the top, it read:

_A Sonnet  
__by Poet Laureate James Potter  
__regarding femme fatale Lily Evans_

Beneath were fourteen lines of struggling poetry.

Remus dared to look at James. A combination of disbelief and mortified anguish roiled on his face, the emotions' grapple for dominance leaving his cheeks a rather unattractive splotchy pinkish color.

"He," James pronounced unsteadily, "is going to _die_ in as _slow_ and _painful_ a way as I can ar—"

"Good _evening_, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, mice and men!" Sirius boomed, appearing from the stairwell before the crowd that had stopped to gauge—and derive great amusement from—James's reaction. Sirius leapt up onto the table, tucked a rose behind his ear, and, with a flourish, produced a scroll from within his robes. "Might I regale you with the latest opus from our very own James Potter, Gryffindor, a man of staggering lyrical genius too profoundly beautiful to be expressed in words?"

Darkly, apparently forgetting that if one ignored Sirius, he did not go away (and instead became increasingly difficult to get rid of), James stumped over to the fireplace and attempted to prise the poster off. It wouldn't come.

"You, of all people, should know how I've perfected Sticking Charms at home, Jamesy," Sirius told him indulgently. He turned to his audience again as James applied fists, fingernails, and teeth to the poster, all in vain. "Now. A heartbreakingly poignant, heart-wrenchingly lovely, untitled sonnet." He cleared his throat. "_I didn't know that rubies could be drawn_," he intoned, "_To manufacture most exquisite wire; / And should have thought their luster would be gone; / But in her hair they blaze with deepest fire._"

Someone whistled. Sirius grinned slightly madly and went on.

"_I didn't know that emeralds could sing;  
__Apparently they are a vocal gem.  
__Her gaze upon me tells me I'm a king,  
__And those who laugh—I'll pay no heed to them._"

Sirius paused and raised an eyebrow at someone who was crowing with laughter. "That means you, gentle listener," he noted.

Abruptly, James abandoned the quest to tear down the poster and launched himself at the table, likely with the intent of tearing Sirius instead—tearing him limb from limb, that was. Kingsley Shacklebolt put a hand on his shoulder and immediately foiled that effort. Kingsley could have subdued a Great White with one hand, let alone a squirming James Potter. There was a flickering, faint trace of amusement on Kingsley's face. Either the older boy very much enjoyed poetry, or he very much enjoyed James's pain.

Remus was betting on the pain.

Sirius gave Kingsley a wide, shining, appreciative smile before returning to his rendition, his voice teeming with emotion.

"_I didn't know that pearl skin could conceal  
__A radiance that measure does defy,  
__And it's that light that truly makes me feel  
__I can't describe her; I'm unfit to try.  
__And can it be that all these things are true?  
__Can she be yet more precious than I knew?_"

He took a deep breath, sighed blissfully, and then swept an elaborate bow, to riotous applause.

James had turned a very unflattering—but intriguingly vibrant—shade of purple. A broad grin was spreading across Kingsley's face, and as the cheering died down, he released his grip on James's shoulder.

James was halfway to rocketing at Sirius with the force of a vengeful freight train when Lily stepped between the two of them, blushing prettily.

"That's really sweet," she said.

James stared at her. The purple gave way to white, which then gave way in turn to tomato red. "You think so?" he asked.

Lily nodded, bit her lip, and darted forward to kiss James on one extremely colorful cheek. Then, blushing harder, she fled up the stairs and vanished into the girls' dorm.

There was flabbergasted silence for a moment.

"Copies will be sold for seven Sickles each," Sirius announced loudly, "for a limited time only."

Fully half the assembled boys reached for their wallets.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"…Thirty-four, and thirty-five." The last coin clinked as James placed it on the pile. "I think there's a viable, fairly lucrative business in my humiliation, Sirius."

"Of course there is," Sirius responded, eyeing Peter's queen mistrustfully. "Otherwise I wouldn't have sought it." He paused and considered. "Well… No, I would anyway." Swiftly he took Peter's bishop. "Oh, yes," he murmured, the spark of murderous delight in his eyes. "First blood. The game is on."

The game continued to be on for another thirty minutes, at which point Peter's king, stranded and lonely at his end of the board, succumbed to the sweeping assault waged by Sirius's men.

Sirius stared at the pieces on the board for a few seconds. Then he flew to his feet and ran whooping around the room, making four full circuits before he stopped running long enough to jump on the couch.

"I'm the _king_!" he shouted. "The king of Britain, of Europe, of the _universe_!"

Peter sighed. "Almost had him," he said sadly.

Sirius buried his hands in the small mountain of Sickles on the table and hurled coins into the air. "Free drinks for everyone!"

Remus glanced at his watch. "Speaking of drinks," he recalled, "I'd better head off. I'm closing tonight."

Sirius, who had almost bounced James right off the couch by now, hopped down. "I'll walk you there," he volunteered. "Rosmerta prob'ly _will_ give me a free drink."

"What you need is a free lobotomy," James commented.

"I love you, too, Sugar-Lumps," Sirius replied, batting his eyelashes. "Call me tomorrow, won't you?"

"If by 'call,' you mean 'mangle beyond all hope of recognition,'" James rejoined, "I think I just might."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sirius whistled as they trooped down the path towards Hogsmeade. Once again, Remus found himself forcing thoughts out of his mind and barricading the entrance against them, because Sirius didn't whistle as well as someone else he knew.

"Did you come because you expected me to get hurt out here?" Remus inquired after Sirius had mutilated the refrain of "Candy-O" for the third time.

"More like, because I expected you to go all vigilante power-trip on us again," Sirius replied, the lightness to his tone extraordinarily transparent.

Remus smiled, partly just because it was what Sirius wanted. He let another minute amble away before posing his next question. "Do you think this is over?"

"Over?" Sirius's fingers were momentarily lost in the inky expanses of his hair as he scratched his head. "No. No, I don't think it's _over_. But our part in it? Maybe that's done."

"Maybe that was the worst?" Remus hazarded, trying not to seem too hopeful.

"Maybe," Sirius replied, sounding unconvincing and unconvinced.

Remus put his hands in his pockets and watched his breath mist in the air and then slowly dissipate away. "Is there a point to all this?" he asked.

"To what?"

"Life."

Sirius smirked. "Now, now, Remus. Having read _Wuthering Heights_, I can assure you that Gothic themes are highly overrated."

"I didn't like that book. Everyone was so… inconsiderate."

"They were assholes, you mean."

"Yes. Except for Nelly and Hareton."

"Right." Sirius paused. "Why in the blazing _hell_ are we having this conversation?" he asked.

"You brought it up," Remus pointed out calmly.

"I did," Sirius confirmed. "And next time I try to do something like that, it is your moral obligation to shoot me. Lethally."

They had reached Hogsmeade; there were still enough lights on in the windows to paint the cobblestone streets butter yellow in patches. Through the new glass at the Three Broomsticks, Remus could see Rosmerta laughing with a few lingering customers. He and Sirius stood just outside the door for a few moments, letting the silence settle. That, Remus thought, was when you knew you had a real friend—when you didn't need words and sometimes didn't really want them.

"Well," Sirius remarked after a while, his gaze on the dark storefront across the street, "I guess I ought to be heading back before Rosmerta catches me and tries to entice me into her bed of sin—"

"_Sirius_!" a jovial voice cried happily.

"Too late," Remus remarked.

Sirius smirked. "Rather much," he acceded.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sirius Black was damn lucky he hadn't done any permanent damage. If he had, Severus would have sought him out and paid him back tenfold, and it would have taken a spatula and a spade to collect the shredded remains.

As morbidly shameful as it had been to wake up on the damp ground in the Forest, however, Severus certainly hadn't been the only one brushing wet leaves off of his back and trying to avoid everyone's eyes.

It was almost all worth it to see Lucius Malfoy picking himself up out of the dirt, his venomousness matched only by his utter impotence. Everyone had seen Lupin take him to the curb, and everyone had chuckled darkly within his head at it. There was something glorious about knowing that Malfoy, who had argued in support of this night more vehemently than anyone, had paid for it in pure dignity.

And if something like that could happen, it almost made you think that maybe—just _maybe_—everything else might work out all right, too.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It was nearing ten o'clock as Noelle Cook made one last circuit of the sixth floor. Even as she considered whether or not she wanted to start on that Transfiguration essay tonight, Sirius turned the corner and started up the staircase she was descending. A luminous flush lit his cheeks, his hair was in beautiful disarray, and his eyes sparked like steel in the sun. They found her, and their owner grinned.

"Noelle!" he hailed her happily. "How are you this fine evening? Wouldn't be considering turning me in for violating that damnable curfew, now, would you?" Mischief danced fervently, fervidly, in his eyes, and Noelle couldn't tear herself away. She had hesitated on the stairs, but he took them two at a time to come level with her, moving in close.

Really close. Close enough for her to count his thick, luscious eyelashes.

"Are you sober?" she asked cautiously, afraid of the answer.

"You know," Sirius mused, "I honestly can't remember." He shrugged and smiled again, blithely. "You're not going to tattle on me for that, though, are you? Because, really, it's not like I _want_ to be standing here talking, unable to shut my fat mouth. You know how there are vomiting drunks, mean drunks, and voluble drunks? I'm a voluble drunk. I was telling Remus, I said, 'We can talk about Shakespeare now, if you want, because first off, I'll actually be able to follow the conversation, and second, I won't remember it tomorrow, so that'll be nice.'" He stopped to think. "Wait, does that mean I _am_ drunk?"

He was close enough for Noelle to examine the individual hairs of his eyebrows. They were very nice eyebrows, really—just heavy enough to be distinctive without looking untidy. "Well, did you drink anything?"

"You know," Sirius reflected, "I honestly can't remember." He paused. "That sounds kind of familiar." He glanced at her again. "You're not going to bust me, right?"

Slowly, Noelle shook her head. She didn't want to make any sudden movements.

"Wonderful!" Sirius decided cheerfully. Delightedly, he smiled at her, and her heart quite swiftly turned itself inside out, after which it took on a very mushy consistency. "You know, Noelle," Sirius remarked, "you're just a wonderful person."

Heat rose to her cheeks, and she couldn't help but smile. Sirius was like a disease. A really, really _gorgeous_ disease. "Thank y—"

He kissed her then, heartily, headily, and a little sloppily. She would gladly have done something, had she had any idea what in the name of all that was holy she was supposed to do.

After a few long seconds, Sirius pulled back, grinning giddily. His hair was tickling her face, and he pressed a cold glass bottle into her hands. "I'd marry you," he told her, his breath on her face faintly sweet, "but I'm afraid I'm promised to Rosmerta."

With that, he galloped up the remaining stairs and went skipping down the corridor.

"Oh, oh, it's magic," he sang, largely off-key, "when I'm with you! Oh, oh, it's magic, just a little bit of magic, pulls me through!"

Noelle stared after him. Then she stared at the bottle of butterbeer in her hand. She pulled the top off and took a very, very long drink.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

If there had been someone on the silver streets of Hogsmeade that night, and if that someone had looked and listened closely, that individual might well have noticed a sixteen-year-old boy sweeping in the Three Broomsticks. And had that individual waited a while, the boy would have started to sing, and the keen listener would have heard a few words riding on the brisk air.

"You ain't nothin' but a hound dog… cryin' all the time… You ain't nothin' but a hound dog… cryin' all the time… You ain't never caught a rabbit, and you ain't no friend of mine…"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE END


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